Dastral of the Flying Corps

As Dastral thought thus, he looked down, far down into the blackness, and he saw the flashes of the searchlights. Sometimes they reached up to him long extended arms that seemed to unite him to the earth, but he could scarcely believe that he had ever dwelt down there in that abyss of murky darkness. Yet always he swerved aside, and evaded those long stretching pillars of light, for he knew that if he crossed their beams but once, other eyes would see him, and the raider above would be warned of his near approach.

Suddenly at twelve thousand feet the monoplane shook itself as though dashing the clinging moisture from its yellow wings, and leapt, like a fish out of the water, above the topmost layer of clouds.

And now with keen searching eyes Dastral looked above and around for the presence of the raider, but she was nowhere to be seen. Below him rolled the clouds, like dark, monstrous billows. Here and there through an opening he still saw the flashes of the searchlights feeling for their prey. But above his head the sky was aflame with millions of stars. Right across from east to west, like a silvery pathway to heaven, shone the Milky Way, luminous with light, and along that trail of diamonds shone the bigger stars, in the constellations of Perseus, Cassiopeia and Aquila. And far down in the east, Orion the Hunter chased the dancing Pleiades, as he did thousands of years before aeroplanes were ever dreamt of.

"But where is the Boche?" Dastral asked himself again and again.

He was beginning to fear that he had lost him. Perhaps the Hun had caught sight of him as he came through the clouds, and had now departed unseen, as he came.

"Great Scott, have I missed him after all?" he cried. "For months and months I have been longing to fight with a Zeppelin, and now he's slipped me."

And for ten minutes he circled about, stopping his engines once or twice to listen for the roar of the invader's engines and propellors. Suddenly something whizzed past him and burst into a jet of flame. It was a shrapnel with a time fuse. Then another and another. They were firing again, then, down below, and they must have picked up the airship once more.

"Good!" he exclaimed. "She must be somewhere near me too, for I am almost in the line of fire."

Looking down he saw what had happened. The clouds in which the Zeppelin had been hiding were breaking up and drifting away, for a fresh, cold wind had sprung up from the east.

"Ah! Ah! I shall see her soon. She cannot escape me now. I shall find her in a few minutes."

"Whiz! Puff!" came another time fuse, and burst not fifty feet away, several pieces of which pierced the left wing of the monoplane.

"By Jove, but that was close!" he cried, throwing out three balls, which burst into red flame as they fell towards the earth, and was the signal for the Archies to stop firing.

"Ah, there she is!" exclaimed the daring pilot, as, out of the clouds, a thousand feet below him, he saw a black mass emerge against the lighter background of the thinning clouds. At the same instant the searchlights found her, and a dozen long arms of streaming light focussed their united rays upon her.

"Gemini! What a target!" cried Dastral, as he pulled the joy-stick over and dived to the attack, without a second's hesitation.

His gun, already cocked and ready to fire through the whirling propellor, and loaded with the new flaming bullet, was brought to bear.

Down, down he went, firing rapidly all the while. Then underneath and alongside her he raced, pumping his second and third drum into the huge looming mass.

Far below his friends saw the whirling monoplane, in the glare of the searchlight, for now it was as bright as day. The A.A. guns had ceased their fire in response to his signals, but the men on the doomed Zeppelin brought three or four of their eleven machine guns to bear upon him, but it was too late. They knew the deadly peril they were in, and it was impossible for them with their unsteady nerves to hit any vital part of that waspish little fiend, which circled round, above and below them at a truly terrific rate.

Dastral, in his rapid nose-dive, had dipped five hundred feet below the monster and flattened out to return to the attack, but, as he commenced his climb again he saw that the silvery glare of the Zeppelin, as it had appeared to him but twenty seconds before in the lure of the searchlights, had taken on a ruby glow, which, as he mounted up, became a ruddy glare.

"Heavens! She is on fire already!" he gasped.

It was only too true. The engines had been set going, for the Zeppelin commander had tried to make his escape, just as he was discovered, but it was too late. He had never suspected that Himmelman's terrible opponent was overhead, having climbed up twelve thousand feet while he had been hiding in the cloud.

"Ach! Gott in Himmel! Wir sind verloren! Donner and Blitz!"

Never will Dastral forget the sight which he beheld that night, close at hand, for the Huns now realised that all was lost, and that a terrible and speedy vengeance awaited them all from which there was no escape. As the huge envelope kindled into fierce leaping flames, two hundred feet high, the pilot could plainly see the panic-stricken crew of the doomed airship, wringing their hands in terror and fright, as they dashed madly along the narrow footways that led from one gondola to another, trying to escape, till the last second, from the fierce flames that spurted out above and below, and licked up and consumed everything with their intense heat.

It was truly a terrible sight, and the burning mass lit up the countryside far below as well as the great metropolis away to the south. Never since the day when every hill-top in England was aflame with the fires that announced the coming of the Spanish Armada, in the days of the great sea-dogs, had such a beacon been lighted in this land of ours.

Down, down fell the flaming mass, lower and lower, while the daring pilot, bewildered at what he had done, followed her, circling round and round, till, when some eight thousand feet from the ground, one of her four hundred-weight bombs, with which her crew had hoped to wipe out some peaceful village, exploded with the intense heat.

"Boom-m-m! Crash!" came the terrible sound, and the flaming mass, shivered into a thousand fragments by the explosion, fell down to the peaceful earth below with the charred and mutilated bodies of its crew of baby-killers.

A few minutes later Dastral, guided by a score of still flaming fragments about the adjacent fields, landed safely on the level stretch of grass from which he had ascended to fight the midnight raider.

Next morning the daring pilot was decorated by His Majesty King George, and ten days later, having bade farewell to his friend, Tim Burkitt, he was back with his Squadron in France, and leading "B" Flight over the German lines once again.

CHAPTER VII

COWDIE, THE "SPARE PART"

"REVEILLE! Show a leg there!" shouted Corporal Yap, one morning, as he went round the tents and hangars about the aerodrome near Contalmaison.

The sleepy air-mechanics of the Royal Flying Corps in the field opened their eyes and yawned, showing no immediate disposition to rise, for the fatigue of the previous day's work had scarcely passed away.

"Did you hear me, Cowdie, you, 'spare part.' Get up there smartly. I shan't call you again. If you're not on parade in fifteen minutes you'll be for the high jump."

"'S all right, Corporal," shouted the "spare part," trying to wriggle out of his roll of blankets and commencing to sing in a doleful monotone:

"Oh, it' snice to get up in the mornin'
But it' snicer to stop in bed…"

Corporal Yap turned and went off on his errand, shaking up a few more "spare parts," and threatening everybody more or less with "the high jump"; which, of course, meant an appearance before the Commanding Officer of the Squadron.

As soon as his woolly head had disappeared behind the flap of the tent door, Cowdie rolled back into his blankets for another minute-and-a-half's nap. As he lay there he looked for all the world like an Egyptian mummy, for he had a peculiar way of rolling himself up in his blankets at night which gave him that appearance. But although his eyes were closed his ears were wide awake for the soft, stealthy tread of the orderly N.C.O., who he knew would be sure to return in about the space of ninety seconds to try to find who had left his warning unheeded.

Cowdie, though a spare part about the aerodrome, was quite a genius in his way. His senses were so acute that the others said he could hear the "footsteps" of a snake in the grass, so they dubbed him the "listening post" and made him sleep next the door of the tent, so that he could always give the alarm in case of need.

At the present moment he was counting under his breath. He knew the orderly's round, and knew to a nicety how long it would take him to get back to tent No. 7. He allowed ninety seconds, and he had just got as far as "eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine," when he suddenly stood bolt upright in his roll of blankets, thereby performing a wonderful gymnastic feat, and looking, with his sleeping cap over his head and ears, not unlike a Turk preparing for his morning ablutions.

Evidently he had heard some soft stealthy tread on the grass outside, for exactly at "ninety" the woolly head of Corporal Yap appeared at the door once more, and his yapping voice called:

"Caught you this time, you trilobite. Out you come! Can't say I didn't give you warning, Cowdie!"

Then catching sight of his man in the grey morning light, the Corporal gasped, and fell back a pace or two.

"The deuce! Do you sleep standing up, man?"

"Sometimes," replied the Spare Part. "M.O.'s orders. Number Nine told me to do so the last time I reported sick."

"Where are you going to? About to have a Turkish bath, I s'pose; all right, my man, I'll catch you yet. If you're not on parade in twelve minutes, bath or no bath, you're for it. D'y'understand?"

"Yes, Corporal, but I'm not going to have a bath. They're dangerous. Number Nine ordered me not to. Said I'd got a murmuring heart, he did," replied the Spare Part meekly.

"Murmuring heart, have you? Then where are you goin' to in that rig?"

"Ain't goin' anywhere; Corporal. I'm standin' still."

"What are you standin' still for?"

"Waitin' for my turn with the shavin' brush," came the quiet answer.