White puffs of smoke and fierce red jets of flame seemed to burst noiselessly around them, for the roar of the propellors drowned or subdued even the sound of the shrapnel as it exploded. Heedless of such small things, however, Dastral and his brave comrades sailed on, sometimes doing a spiral or a rapid nose-dive, if the enemy appeared to have found the range too closely. Soon, however, they were ambushed in a friendly cloud, which hid them from the Huns far below, and when they had emerged from the clinging moisture, they were far beyond the enemy's third line trenches, and out into the open, with smiling fields and vineyards beneath them. "Is that it?" yelled Dastral to his observer, jerking his head sideways, and pointing with his finger to something like a railway cutting far below. "Yes. The Bapaume-Havrincourt railway line!" shouted his companion through the speaking-tube which ended close to the pilot's ear, for although only a few feet away, that was the only possible method of communication without shutting off the engines. "Good!" nodded the pilot, for, despite the speaking-tube, conversation was chiefly carried on by well understood cabalistic signs. A few minutes later Dastral pointed to a cluster of red roofs about a little church. "What is that place?" The observer, with one finger still on the little waterproof map in front of him, shouted back, "Beugny on the left. Haplincourt on the right." "Yes, yes!" nodded the pilot, edging a little more south-east, as though the railway were not his objective. In so doing he alarmed Fisker, his companion, who feared he had misunderstood him. "What's the matter?" he shouted. "You're leaving the target. The bridge-head and the ravine is over there, east-nor'-east. That's where the junction is, at Velu." "Right-o, old man! Glad you're awake. Keep your eyes well skinned away to the east for Fokkers and Rolands. This is Himmelman's favourite hunting-ground. He'll be down on us from the clouds like a thunderbolt, if we're not careful. I want to get up to twelve thousand, and come back on to the junction from the east." "Oh-ay!" came the laconic rejoinder from Fisker, who quickly understood the manoeuvre. Then, leaving his map for a moment, he swept the horizon for any signs there might be of the enemy's 'planes. So for nearly an hour the machines, playing at "follow-my-leader," swept round and round, watching and waiting in an altitude where, to put it mildly, it was cold enough to freeze a kettle of boiling water in ten minutes. Cold? Yes, it was bitterly cold. Both Dastral and Fisker felt it through their thick leather, wool-lined coats.