As he spoke the aeroplane which Beryl Gaselee was flying, that great battleplane of Ronnie’s invention—“The Hornet,” as they had named it on account of a certain politician’s reassurance—circled high in the air above the aerodrome, making a high-pitched hum quite different from that of the other machines in the air.
“She’s taken the silencer off,” Ronnie remarked. “She’s in a hurry, no doubt.”
“That silencer of yours is a marvellous invention,” George declared. “Thank goodness Fritz hasn’t got it!”
Ronnie smiled, and selecting a cigarette from his case, tapped it down and slowly lit it, his eyes upon the machine now hovering like a great hawk above them.
“I can run her so that at a thousand feet up nobody below can hear a sound,” he remarked. “That’s where we’ve got the pull for night bombing. A touch on the lever and the exhaust is silent, so that the enemy can’t hear us come up.”
“Yes. It’s a deuced cute invention,” declared his partner. “It saved me that night a month ago when I got over Alost and put a few incendiary pills into the German barracks. I got away in the darkness and, though half-a-dozen machines went up, they couldn’t find me.”
“The enemy would dearly like to get hold of the secret,” laughed Ronnie. “But all of us keep it guarded too carefully.”
“Yes,” said his partner, as they watched with admiring eyes, how Beryl Gaselee, the intrepid woman aviator, was manipulating the big battleplane in her descent. “Your invention for the keeping of the secret, my dear fellow, is quite as clever as the invention itself.”
The new silencer for aeroplane-engines Ronnie Pryor had offered to the authorities, and as it was still under consideration, he kept it strictly to himself. Only he, his mechanic, Beryl and his partner George Bellingham, knew its true mechanism, and so careful was he to conceal it from the enemy in our midst, that he had also invented a clever contrivance by which, with a turn of a winged nut, the valve came apart, so that the chief portion—which was a secret—could be placed in one’s pocket, and carried away whenever the machines were left.
“I don’t want any frills from you, old man,” laughed the merry, easy-going young fellow in flannels. “I’m only trying to do my best for my country, just as you have done, and just as Beryl is doing.”