“It was just like you; I knew you’d get stuck,” were the consoling words which Slade uttered to Archer. “You should have gone by the Ridge road and you’d have been all right.” “Yes, and where would you have landed if it hadn’t been forr me?” Archer very properly replied. “You’d have been tearrin’ arround the sky and maybe got stranded on Marrs for all I know.”
“Don’t roll your R’s so much,” Slade replied. “Can’t you say Mars?”
“It was good to see him again,” Archer told me, “and hearr him talk in that funny, soberr way he had. He was always kidding me about R’s.” Indeed, it would be hard to say who was the rescuer and who the rescued in this extraordinary business. I suppose it may be said that they rescued each other.
“What are we going to do now?” Archer asked. “I’ve got to get to Brienne if I can, or go all the way to Paris if I have to. They won’t do a thing but wing us in Paris. I say, keep out of Paris.”
Which was very good advice, first and last, and more than one boy in khaki had heard it.
“Do you know wherre we arre?” Archer asked.
“I know about where we are,” Slade answered. “Throw your searchlight over there. See that kind of black——”
“Yes, I see it,” Archer interrupted.
“I think that’s the hills near Barsaby,”[5] Tom replied. “Wait till I see what time it is. There’ll be a train leaving there about eleven, going down to Chatillon. It whistles just before it goes in the tunnel. If I hear that I can tell about where we are.”
“Maybe it can’t run,” Archer reminded him.
“It’s got to run—that’s a commissary centre,” Slade said. “And it’s right along the mountains anyway.” He looked at his watch and saw that it was fifteen minutes of eleven.
“What do you mean to do?” Archer asked, a bit puzzled.
“If I hear that whistle, I can tell just about where we are,” Slade said. “If it sounds kind of dim south of here I’ll know we’re just about east of Troyes. I know we’re east of Troyes but I can’t tell if we’re a little north or a little south of it. I’d rather use my ears than a compass a night like this. I can run her straight west all right, right into the wind, but if I’ve got to climb upstairs I want to know it.”
Archer did not fully understand, nor indeed did I, except I infer that Slade intended to measure the almost exact distance to a certain place (Bar-sur-Aube) by the whistle of a locomotive and to lay his aerial course accordingly. I think that here was another instance of the value of his woods lore and scout training.
That he did this thing, Archer assures me. The rain was at last holding up and the gale subsiding into a brisk, steady wind out of the west, and they sat, these two, in the two seats of the plane, and chatted about old times, there in that desolate submerged meadow. And here is something that will please you.
“He was talking about Bridgeboro, wherre he used to live,” said Archer, “and a fellerr he knew therre that got him into the Boy Scouts a long time ago. Roy Blakeley was that fellerr’s name.” So you see that far away in the devastated, scourged land of France, your name was given to the same wind which was to bear these two adventurers to their destination. And so, chatting, they waited in the lonely darkness.
“The job will be getting her started,” Slade said.
“How about landing?” Archer asked him.
“It’ll be easier now I’ve got somebody with me. Got your dispatch book?”
Of course Archer had.
“Then go and get a spoke out of your wheel or maybe the timer-bar would be better. Get two or three spokes. You’ve got your clippers all right, haven’t you? Go ahead. I’ll tell you when you get back. Get some wire off your mudguard, too.”
“There was only one way to do with Slady,” Archer observes. “You had to do just what he said.”
So he waded through the soggy field to where his motorcycle, half sunken in the mud which had been a road, stood “pokin’ upwarrd,” as he said, “like an old balky horrse.” Its carbureter and gas tank must have been filled with mud by now and there was no hope of getting a kick out of it even if he could have extricated it. With his nippers he clipped off several spokes and removed also the long nickel rod by which the timer was controlled at the handle bar. This was about three feet long. He took also the wire and his nippers.
Scarcely had he returned when they were both struck silent by the thin, spent sound of a locomotive whistle far in the distance.
“You’re all right, Slady!” Archer exclaimed in admiration.
“It’s comin’ across the wind,” said Slade. “We’ve got to allow for that.” He screwed up his mouth sideways, Archer said, and looked for all the world like a “regularr old grandmotherr with his goggles up on his forrehead.”
“It’s all right,” he said finally, “we’re all right now if we can only get her out of here. These old Hun ice wagons weigh about a hundred tons. If we fly straight west we’ll strike Troyes in half an hour. Even if we don’t just strike it, we’ll see the glare and that’s all I care about. We can land in the school[6] just outside the town. They’ll have the four lights on account of a patrol being out, may............