"Say, Orry," remarked an athletic youth, throwing an arm casually over the shoulder of a smaller companion beside him and tweaking the other's ear, "does this mean that you and me go up together in that crazy old biplane they foisted on us before?"
"How should I know?" replied the smaller lad, a nervous, sprightly youngster, dark-eyed, curly-headed, thin-faced. "Did she get your nerve last time?"
"Not by a long shot! But when we made that last dive to get away from
Fritzy in his Fokker, I noticed your hands on the crank were shaking.
Say, if that Tommy in the monoplane hadn't helped us, where'd we been?"
"Right here, you goose! We'd have got out somehow, but it was squally for about five minutes."
The two strolled off together as others, also in khaki but with different fittings or insignia, gathered about to read, comment and then turn their several ways.
"We are in that bombing squad all right, I guess remarked Lafe Blaine, the athletic youngster. "But I am tired of this everlasting bombing that goes on, mostly by night. We're chums, Orry; we work together all right. There is no one in this camp can handle a fighting machine better than I; nor do I want a better, truer backer at the Lewis than you."
The Lewis gun was the one then most in use at this aerodrome station, which was somewhere on that section near where the British and French sectors meet.
"You always were a bully boy, Lafe, in spite of your two big handles. Say, how'd they come to call you Lafayette when you already had such a whopper of a surname?"
"Oh, dry up, Orry! Those names often make me tired. I'm only an ordinary chap, but with those names every noodle thinks I ought to be something real big. Catch on?"
Orris Erwin nodded and pinched the other's massive fore-arm, as he replied: