"No, no! All goes well--very well, except for us here," Captain O'Neill replied. "The time is moved forward; that is all."

He bent again over the map.

"There will not be time now if you are taken far back of the German lines where an aeroplane may come down un.o.bserved. There will not be time," he repeated to Hal, "for you to work forward to the position where you must be."

"What's the matter with coming down near the position where we're wanted?" asked Hal.

"Near their lines?" Captain O'Neill questioned. "There will be men all about, of course; you will be observed."

"What's the matter with coming down observed sir?" said Chester.

"Observed," repeated the captain. "How do you mean?"

"It is something we have talked of before," said Hal. "We have often considered this method of getting a man down inside the German lines, even in a section where discovery is certain. A machine goes up carrying bombs, perhaps; it drops them and attracts anti-aircraft fire. It appears to fall, sir, and comes down in that way."

Captain O'Neill's brows drew together, puzzled, but he was patient.

"But I do not see the advantage," he said.

"It falls in flames, sir," said Hal. "The pilot ignites it when it begins to drop."

"Proceed," Captain O'Neill bade.

"The men found in it are killed," continued Hal "'killed by the shrapnel fire--also, of course, they burn with the aeroplane. It is, to all observers, a bombing biplane shot down in flames."

"And you think such a plan will succeed?" asked the captain.

"I feel sure of it, sir."

"Well," said Captain O'Neill, "you are the two who must take the chances. You have my permission to adopt your own plans."

CHAPTER XXVIII

OVER THE LINES

"You will carry these with you, of course," said Captain O'Neill, "those who will be found in, the plane?"

"Yes, sir," said Hal. "They need not be aviators, but merely in uniform."

"You drop from the machine as she strikes, I suppose?" said the captain. "She will run after that, of course."

"Certainly it will leave us unsuspected," said Chester. "It will aid our escape. Certainly no one would suspect a man had planned to fall in flames."

"You have suggested enough," said the captain. "Your idea alters much. Meet me in half an hour. Everything will be prepared."

He named a place and left the hut.

Jean Brosseau bent forward in bed, his eyes burning.

"When Captain O'Neill gives you final instructions he may tell you to employ certain people on the other side. Here!" he motioned for the map again, "I shall point out to you where they are."

He took a pencil and made a dot toward the corner of one of the squares.

"In the old military maps a house stood there," he said. "My father's house it was. There was also a stable; there was also a cellar, which the Germans have discovered, but beyond it was an old cellar quite concealed. Our people, at different times, have hidden there. There are both men and women there now. They will help you if they can."

Jean Brosseau fell back on the bed and closed his eyes.

An hour later Hal climbed into the pilot seat of the biplane that Captain O'Neill had placed at their disposal. He felt somewhat uncomfortable in his ragged attire, but he knew that he could not be attired in better costume for the undertaking. Chester also had discarded his civilian clothes and donned rags.

The big "bus," as the airplanes were called, with propeller whirling, lumbered over the ground; the smoothness of flying came to it and, deafened to everything but the clatter of the motor and the thrash of the air-screw, Hal gazed down. Points of light, yellow and red and some almost white, glowed on the ground. Some of these marked villages, encampments; others signified nothing at all--decoys to attract the "eggs" of the German night flying falcons.

They neared the lines, and the strip of "No Man's Land," with the pocked and pitted streaks of defenses on both sides, gleamed white and spectral green under the star-dashed sh.e.l.ls. An infantry attack was going on; Hal could see the shapes of men as they flattened; they were pinched to dots when they jumped up and then they spread out again.

Before them burst the frightful fireworks of their own barrage; behind them, and above, that of the enemy.

Hal shivered in the cold; it was very chill there flying high above the lines, and he wore but the rags of Jean Brosseau. Directly below them the land had become black again, specked only by little points of light, yellow, ruddy, white; some of these, like the lights behind the French lines, perhaps marked hamlets, encampments; others were mere decoy-lights; others--they showed but for the briefest second when the biplane pa.s.sed overhead were the guiding lights for the French and American pilots. These were set in chimneys by the French behind the German lines; any light, if seen by Germans and recognized, might cost the annihilation of a family, or a neighborhood; many times such lights had cost such savage penalty. Still, they were set.

Hal and Chester warmed at sight of them this night as never before.

They were going to the people who had set those lights.

The biplane banked and circled. Below was the square where the airplane was to be shot down. Troops were moving through those fields, undoubtedly, advancing in single file through communication trenches or dashing from sh.e.l.l hole to sh.e.l.l hole; other troops lingered in dugouts underground. The French batteries played all over those fields, spraying down shrapnel, detonating the frightful charges of high explosives. But at an hour before the appointed time--at 9 o'clock--the French batteries would remit their fire for ten minutes upon the square where the biplane should fall. Hal looked at the clock fastened before him. It was two minutes to 9; he could see, directly below, the crimson splash of the great French sh.e.l.ls; a little way to the side showed the flashes of the German heavy batteries making reply.

Now, as though smothered by the German fire, the French batteries ceased. It was 9 o'clock, and Hal circled above the German batteries, which were firing, and Chester released the first bomb. Before it struck and burst, he let go another. He laid a third "egg" close beside a German battery--so close that the battery ceased to fire; but before the fourth dropped the anti-aircraft guns were going.

Chester could hear, above the racket of the motor and the air-screw, the "pop, pop" of smashing shrapnel. They ran through the floating smoke of a sh.e.l.l, the acrid ether-smelling stuff stinging their nostrils. The beams of searchlights swept into the air. Hal circled more carefully and deliberately dropped lower; Chester let two more bombs drop near the batteries; he cleared the frames of the last pair of "eggs," and, leaning forward, struck Hal's shoulder to tell him so.

The phosphorus-painted face of the altimeter showed the pointer registering less than 2,000 feet; before the breaking German sh.e.l.ls should do, in fact, what it was to be pretended they had done, Chester reached up and ignited the preparation smeared over the top plane.

Yellow flames flared up, and, to keep them above and behind, Hal pointed the nose of the biplane far down and let her fall.

He turned, as he let the machine dive, back toward the French lines.

Then, as the German antiaircraft gunners saw their target flashing clear in flames and they strewed their shrapnel closer before it, the biplane fluttered and fell, no longer diving under guidance, but out of control.

Chester jerked about to Hal; over the forms strapped between them, he saw Hal's face in the light of the flame. Hal was not hit; he had merely let go of the controls. It was part of the plan to let the machine fall out of control. But, for a moment, it was too much as if Hal had been hit.

The biplane side-slipped, "went off the wing," sickeningly, dropping down spinning. Then, suddenly, with a catch of a well-made, well-balanced plane, the inherent stability a.s.serted itself, and the planes caught; the big "bus" fluttered like a falling leaf, "flattened out," and rested; now, it side-slipped again and fell, and Hal did not touch the controls.

Chester, looking down, saw that the flashes of the guns off to the side had come halfway to him; if the falling plane caught itself again after the same amount of drop, side-slipping, it would hover not too far from the ground before going "off the wing" again. That is, it might.

Anyway, the flames which had caught the wing fabric and were blazing the breadth of the wings above and jumping back now to the rudder and the tail were kept above; and to anyone on the ground the illusion of a machine shot down, burning and out of control, must have become complete.

Chester held on, not breathing. The momentary flutter and hover of the machine was over. It was dropping down again in a wild, sliding swoop--yet Hal made no move to stop it even when it half turned over.

Soon, however, he made a move, and, before the slide had gone too far, he caught it as before it had caught itself; it fluttered, hovered, the flames streaking up straight above it; the ground now just below. Then it went "off the wing" again and crashed.

Chester, leaping clear at the instant of the impact, stumbled and fell on his face and rolled down a sh.e.l.l hole. He caught himself, half stunned and dizzy, and tried to crawl back toward the burning plane.