oined forces with a battery of
high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased
to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw
that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was
pointing toward the plain.

"And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising
now--evidently already out of reach of our guns--and nothing against
them!" he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its
attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the
movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry
disgust. "Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What?
What--" A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed,
he cupped his hands over his eyes. "So, that is it! That is your plan,
Lanny, old boy!" he shouted. "But if one of their confounded little
aviators gets back, he has the story!"

From a great altitude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over
the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes
descending across the track of the Grays.

"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home--between the
badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the
two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the
thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is
war--war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage,
pray-and-swear courage--what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen
men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild
charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in
sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret!
Now--now for it!"

The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the
planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages
and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two
small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course.
But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded
would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.

Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before
she withdrew them in vexation--hadn't she promised herself not to be
cowardly?--to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending
at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to e