and other loyal deserving pilots be left behind? Someone was
being pig-headed indeed!

2

Along about two o'clock in the morning the eager pilots, tossing on
their beds in a sleeplessness induced by the promise of the coming of
dawn, were more fully awakened by the deep and sullen thundering of
thousands of big guns hammering at the lines. It was no fitful,
momentary outburst; it was the constant earth-shaking roar that presages
a drive. To the north and east the sky flickered with the light coming
from thousands of cannon mouths. It was like the coming of a summer
storm when the thunder god growls his wrath and lightning plays
constantly over the giant thunderheads.

There could be no sleep now for the anxious pilots. Something had popped
loose up there, and in a few more hours they would be on their way up to
witness this far-flung duel.

The flickering, flashing light of cannon fire faded at last before the
salmon and rose colored morning light that streaked the smoke clouds
lying across the pathway of the coming sun. Long before that orb of
light arose, red-eyed, over a new scene of carnage, ten planes were out
on the line, motors warming, while the pilots and mechanics made last
minute inspections. Every member of the squadron was present; the
unlucky ones to bid good luck to those chosen for the mission and to see
the take-off of this first dawn patrol. Their interest was intensified
by the throaty rumbling of the distant guns.

It was an hour of high suspense. For this hour every man present had
waited with a keen desire that had been his prompter and spur through
all the long, wearying months of training. All the schooling in theory
was now behind. Experience, that hard teacher, was now at the controls.
The school of machine gunnery, where dummies and swift moving targets
had served as theoretical enemies, was now to become a real school where
the enemy was also armed and where mistakes and misses were likely to
hurl the pupil out of the class with never a chance to profit by the
mistake.

The dawn patrol! The day! From this hour they would begin to tally their
earned victories. On this night, if lucky enough to encounter the enemy,
some of them would send in reports that would start them up the ladder
toward that coveted rank--an ace! It never entered the mind of any one
of them that some enemy pilot, already an ace and rich in experience,
might send in a report fattening his record and increasing his