HAPTER VII

THE MAN BEHIND THE CIRCUS

There comes to every great artist a moment when a sense of the futility
of his efforts weighs upon and well-nigh crushes him. Such an oppression
represents the reaction which follows or precedes much excellent work.
The psychologist will, perhaps, fail to explain why this sense of
emptiness so often comes before a man's best accomplishments, and what
association there is between that dark hour of anguish which goes before
the dawn of vision, and the perfect opportunity which invariably
follows.

Sergeant-Pilot Tam struck a bad patch of luck. In the first place, he
had missed a splendid chance of catching von Rheinhoff, who with
thirty-one "crashes" to his credit came flaunting his immoral triumph in
Tam's territory. Tam had the advantage of position and had
attacked--and his guns had jammed. The luck was not altogether against
him, for, if every man had his due, von Rheinhoff should have added
Tam's scalp to the list of his thirty-one victims.

Tam only saved himself by taking the risk of a spinning nose dive into
that zone of comparative safety which is represented by the distance
between the trajectories of high-angle guns and the flatter curve made
by the flight of the eighteen-pounder shell.

Nor were his troubles at an end that day, for later he received
instructions to watch an observation balloon, which had been the
recipient of certain embarrassing attentions from enemy aircraft. And in
some miraculous fashion, though he was in an advantageous position to
attack any daring intruder, he had been circumvented by a low-flying
Fokker.

The first hint he received that the observation balloon was in
difficulties came when he saw the two observers leap into space with
their parachutes, and a tiny spiral of smoke ascend from the fat and
helpless "sausage."

Tam dived for the pirate machine firing both guns--then, for the second
time that day, the mechanism of his gun went wrong.

"Accidents will happen," said the philosophical Blackie; "you can't have
it all your own way, Tam. If I were you I'd take a couple of days
off--you can have ten days' leave if you like, you're entitled to it."

But Tam shook his head. "A'll tak' a day, sir-r," he said, "for
meditation an' devotional exercise wi' that wee bit gun."

So he turned into the workshop and stripped the weapon, calling each
part by name until he found, in a slovenly fitted ejector, reason and
excuse for exercising h