e
motors,' 'e sez. 'They quit on me quite sudden like. Look 'em over,
will you?' 'e sez. So I been lookin' 'em over. But they ain't nothin'
wrong with the bloody things, sir--nothin' at all!"

"It does seem funny, doesn't it, Wells?" Lance said levelly. He'd
known it all along. Praed was a quitter--a yellow-belly--besides
being--But he stopped there. He had no definite proof. It was unjust
to accuse a man of _that_ without definite, positive proof.

The little mechanic muttered some mysterious cockney curse, and then
said, in an admiring tone:

"'Ow many of the swines' planes 'ave you shot down now, sir?"

"About twenty, I think," Lance told him gruffly. The cockney shot his
breath out with a whistle.

"Cripes! You'll be up to that there Captain Hay soon if you keeps it
up, sir!"

Lance laughed. Hay, the almost legendary hero of the American Air
Force--who had shot down, so latest rumors said, fifty Slav
planes--was far above him. "I'll never reach Hay's record, Wells. I'll
be doing pretty well if I bag half as many!" Then, seeing Ranth, the
orderly, followed by Praed, he strode quickly away and came face to
face with the latter.

* * * * *

For a moment the two men eyed each other, a taut silence between them.
Praed's thin, sun-blackened countenance was immovable, masklike. His
blue-green eyes met Lance's steadily. Finally Lance snorted and burst
out:

"Why the hell did you run away, Praed? Scared stiff?"

Praed's low voice, devoid of all trace of emotion, asked: "What makes
you think I was scared, Lance?"

"You know damn well what makes me think it! That lousy crack about
your motors being shot!"

"Two of my motors were limping."

Lance gave a sarcastic chuckle. "Ask Wells about that, why don't you?
He's got a few ideas on the subject."

Praed repeated: "Two of my motors were limping," and abruptly he
turned away, leaving Lance fuming, and went into Colonel Douglas'
office.

What would Douglas say to him? Accuse him outright of his suspicions?
Put him under arrest as a spy? But he couldn't do that: there was,
after all, no proof. Lance swore to himself; then, feeling a wave of
weariness surge over him, went to the shack he was quartered in,
kicked off his battered boots, stripped away his Sam Browne, and flung
his lean body out on the hard, gray-sheeted cot. Seconds later he was
lost in the sleep that comes to the physically exhausted. The
desperate situation Americ