ackie, and Blackie got on to Headquarters
by 'phone.

"Tam seems to have had an adventure, sir," he said, when he had induced
H. Q. exchange to connect him with his general and gave the lurid
details.

"It might be Hindenburg," said the general thoughtfully. "He's on the
Western Front somewhere--that may explain the appearance of the
circuses--or it may have been a corps general showing off the circus to
a few trippers from Berlin--they are always running Reichstag members
and pressmen round this front. Get Tam to make a report--his own report,
not one you have edited." Blackie heard him chuckle. "I showed the last
one to the army commander and he was tickled to death--hurry it along,
I'm dying to see it."

If there is one task which an airman dislikes more than any other, it is
report-writing. Tam was no exception, and his written accounts of the
day's work were models of briefness.

In the days of his extreme youth he had been engaged in labor which did
not call for the clerical qualities, and roughly his written "reports"
were modeled on the "time sheets" he was wont to render in that far-off
period, when he dwelt in lodgings at Govan, and worked at McArdle's
Shipbuilding Yard.

Thus:

Left aerodrome 6 A. M.
Enemy patrols encountered 5
Ditto ditto chased 4
Ditto ditto forced down 2
Bombs dropped on Verleur Station 5
&c., &c.

Fortunately Tam possessed a romantic and a poetical soul, and there were
rare occasions when he would offer a lyrical account of his adventures
containing more color and detail. As, for example, his account of his
fight with Lieutenant Prince Zwartz-Hamelyn:

"Oh, wad some power the giftie gi'e us
Tae see oursel's as ithers see us."
Thus spake a high an' princely Hun
As he fired at Tam wi' his Maxim gun.
Thinkin', na doot, that bonnie lad
Was lookin', if no' feelin', bad.
But Tam he stalled his wee machine
An' straffit young Zwartz-Hamelyn.

It was Blackie who harnessed Tam's genius for description to the pencil
of a stenographer, and thereafter, when a long report was needed by
Headquarters, there would appear at Tam's quarters one Corporal
Alexander Brown, Blackie's secretary, and an amiable cockney who wrote
mystic characters in a notebook with great rapidity.

"Is it ye, Alec?" said Tam, suspending his ablutions to open t