interchange of short German sentences. I gathered the sense of what
passed.

"I don't see it now," said, in effect, my late traveling mate, staring
skyward and turning his head.

"Nor do I," answered the captain. "I thought it was yonder." He flirted
a thumb backward and upward over his shoulder.

"Are you sure you saw it?"

"No, not sure," said the captain. "I called you down at the first
alarm, and right after that it disappeared, I think; but I shall make
sure."

He snapped an order to the soldiers and vaulted nimbly into the basket.
The horses turned about and moved off and the balloon rose. As for the
lieutenant, he spun round and ran toward the edge of the field, fumbling
at his belt for his private field glasses as he ran. Wondering what all
this bother was about--though I had a vague idea regarding its meaning--
I watched the ascent.

I should say the bag had reached a height of five hundred feet when,
behind me, a hundred yards or so away, a soldier shrieked out excitedly.
Farther along another voice took up the outcry. From every side of the
field came shouts. The field was ringed with clamor. It dawned on me
that this spot was even more efficiently guarded than I had conceived it
to be.

The driver of the wagon swung his lumbering team about with all the
strength of his arms, and back again came the six horses, galloping now.
So thickly massed were the men who snatched at the cable, and so eagerly
did they grab for it, that the simile of a hot handball scrimmage
flashed into my thoughts. I will venture that balloon never did a
faster homing job than it did then.

Fifty men were pointing aloft now, all of them crying out as they
pointed:

"Flyer! French flyer !"

I saw it. It was a monoplane. It had, I judged, just emerged from a
cloudbank to the southward. It was heading directly toward our field.
It was high up--so high up that I felt momentarily amazed that all those
Germans could distinguish it as a French flyer rather than as an English
flyer at that distance.

As I looked, and as all of us looked, the balloon basket hit the earth
and was made fast; and in that same instant a cannon boomed somewhere
well over to the right. Even as someone who knew sang out to us that
this was the balloon cannon in the German aviation field back of the
town opening up, a tiny ball of smoke appeared against the sky,
seemingly quite close to the darting flyer, and blossomed out with
downy, daint