as keeping himself all the while, when suddenly a very strange thing
happened beyond the enemy's line.

Lieutenant Mackinson was the first to discover it and call the attention
of the others.

A Taube, one of the smaller, lighter, and more easily handled
aeroplanes, and used in great numbers by the Germans, shot into the air
at great speed from behind the Boche entrenchments. In its upward course
its path was a dizzy spiral, and, if one on the ground might judge, its
pilot seemed to be seeking a particular air channel. At least that was
the way it looked.

Then, from almost the same point from which it had come into view, half
a dozen other planes rose into the air, following in the path of the
first, and also flying at top speed. Up to then there was nothing so
very strange about the whole procedure. It simply indicated that those
manning the American and French anti-aircraft guns, and the aviators of
those two armies, should get ready to repel an enemy air raid.

But the queer thing occurred when every one of the pursuing planes
opened up their machine-guns almost simultaneously upon the first. And
even this might have been considered a well-designed hoax, were it not
for the unmistakable evidence that the first aeroplane, the Taube, had
been hit.

Still going at maximum speed, and now on a straight line toward the
American side, without seeking a further height, the Taube several times
wavered, and, a moment later, almost turned over.

But the pilot righted her, and even as the pursuers began gaining, and
still kept up an incessant fire, he pointed her nose downward toward the
American lines.

Four American planes sailed off and upward to meet the oncoming German
air armada. But from the ground it could be seen that the man in the
observer's place in the Taube was making desperate signals.

The American planes maneuvered in such a way as to encircle the Taube,
and yet at close enough range to examine her without particular menace
to themselves. There were several seconds of criss-crossing and rising
and descending, and then as a unit the American planes left the Taube
and started after the German craft, which had hesitated, as though
uncertain what further course to follow.

Several volleys of shots were exchanged, and the other German planes
turned back toward their own lines. The Taube continued on its wavering,
crippled, downward course toward the allied lines.

"Looks as though a couple of our men had