igh; that, seeing us
descend, he hid in a cloud ambush, venturing out once more, with his
purpose renewed, when the balloon reascended, bearing the captain. I
liked to entertain that idea, because it gave me a feeling of having
shared to some degree in a big adventure.

As for the captain and the lieutenant, they advanced no theories
whatever. The thing was all in the day's work to them. It had happened
before. I have no doubt it has happened many times since.

Chapter 10

In the Trenches Before Rheims

After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of an
anticlimax--was bound to be anti-climactic. Yet the remainder of the
afternoon was not without action. Not an hour later, as we stood in a
battery of small field guns--guns I had watched in operation from my
lofty gallery seat--another flyer, or possibly the same one we had
already seen, appeared in the sky, coming now in a long swinging sweep
from the southwest, and making apparently for the very spot where our
party had stationed itself to watch the trim little battery perform.

It had already dropped some form of deadly souvenir we judged, for we
saw a jet of black smoke go geysering up from a woodland where a German
corps commander had his field headquarters, just after the airship
passed over that particular patch of timber. As it swirled down the wind
in our direction the vigilant balloon guns again got its range, and, to
the throbbing tune of their twin boomings, it ducked and dodged away,
executing irregular and hurried upward spirals until the cloud-fleece
swallowed it up.

The driver of that monoplane was a persistent chap. I am inclined to
believe he was the selfsame aviator who ventured well inside the German
lines the following morning. While at breakfast in the prefecture at
Laon we heard the cannoneer-sharpshooters when they opened on him; and
as we ran to the windows--we Americans, I mean, the German officers
breakfasting with us remaining to finish their coffee--we saw a colonel,
whom we had met the night before, sitting on a bench in the old
prefecture flower garden and looking up into the skies through the
glasses that every German officer, of whatsoever degree, carries with
him at all times.

He looked and looked; then he lowered his glasses and put them back into
their case, and took up the book he had been reading.

"He got away again," said the colonel regretfully, seeing us at the
window. "Plucky fe