th the leader of a great army."

"I don't know. I may not be able to fly like the Frenchman, but he can't
handle the wireless as I can, and he isn't the chain-lightning chauffeur
that Carstairs is. Please to remember those facts."

"I do. But here comes Lannes, the man of mystery."

Lannes seemed preoccupied, but he greeted Carstairs and Wharton warmly.

"I'm about to take another flight," he said. "No, thank you so much, but
I've time neither to eat nor to drink. I must fly at once, though it's
to be a short flight. Take care of my friend, Monsieur Jean the Scott,
while I'm gone, won't you? Don't let him wander into German hands again,
because I won't have time to go for him once more."

"We won't!" said Carstairs and Wharton with one voice. "Having got him
back we're going to keep him."

Lannes smiling sprang into the _Arrow_. The willing young Englishmen
gave it a mighty push, and rising into the blue afternoon sky he sailed
away toward the south.

"He'll be back all right," said Carstairs. "I've come to the conclusion
that nothing can ever catch that fellow. He's a wonder, he is. One of
the most difficult jobs I have, Scott, is to give the French all the
credit that's due 'em. I've been trained, as all other Englishmen were,
to consider 'em pretty poor stuff that we've licked regularly for a
thousand years, and here we suddenly find 'em heroes and
brothers-in-arms. It's all the fault of the writers. Was it Shakespeare
who said: 'Methinks that five Frenchmen on one pair of English legs did
walk?'"

"No," said Lord James Ivor, "It was the other way around. 'Methinks that
one Englishman on five pairs of French legs did walk.'"

"I'm not so sure about the number, either," interjected Wharton. "Are
you positive it was five?"

"Whatever it was," said Carstairs, "the Frenchman was slandered, and by
our own great bard, too. But come and take something with us, if Lord
James, our immediate chief, is willing."

"He's willing, and he'll go with you," said Lord James Ivor. "I need a
bite myself and in war like this a man can't afford to neglect food and
drink, when the chance is offered."

"The habits of you Europeans are strong," said John, whose spirits were
still exuberant. "If you didn't have to stop now and then to work or to
fight you'd eat all the time. One meal would merge into another, making
a beautiful, savory chain linked together. I know the Englishman's
heaven perfectly well. It's made of lakes of al