“Must be an air-park somewhere around,” suggested Rex.
“Jack Straw told us to keep our eyes open for anything military up this way,” nodded Simon.
“If it is,” drawled Rex, “it ’ud sure interest the secret service folks in Washington.”
“An air-park,” murmured the Duke. “And you say, Rex, that these ’planes are of a completely different type to those generally used in Europe and America?”
“Sure, the wings are set at a different angle, and they’re shorter — you can see how much more like dickybirds they look than ours.”
They continued their way through the forest, but after they saw the first squadron of big bombers, the hum of innumerable aeroplanes was always in the background, loud or faint, breaking the silence of the afternoon.
In threes or in sixes, or singly, the sky was rarely free of them as they swooped or hovered, practising their evolutions. They were of three distinct types — the single-seater scouts, the big bombers, and what Rex declared to be a four-seater fighting machine. All of them were monoplanes, but fitted with a queer upper structure of two slanting blades, which formed a smaller pair of wings — these, Rex thought, were a new form of helicopter, to enable them to land in a confined space.
They had just breasted a slight rise, when they first saw the fence; it stretched away on either hand, some fifty yards in front of them, the height of a man, and formed of six strands of copper wire, which shone brightly in the sunlight — the wires stretched taut throughout steel uprights. It looked innocent enough, but De Richleau, at least, had seen fences of that type before — on the enemy frontiers during the War.
As they walked up to it, he laid his hand on Simon’s arm: “Be careful, it is almost certain to be electrified — it would be instant death to touch it!”
Rex pointed to a dead ermine that lay a few feet away. “Sure thing, that poor feller crashed it. I guess he never knew what hit him. I’ll say they’re mighty keen to keep people out of their backyard in these parts.”