"Your comrade, messieurs, he is gone. I fear he is a prisoner. He made signs that he was thirsty, and I left him there at the aeroplane while I returned here to fetch him some little refreshment. Ma foi! I was just uncorking the bottle when I heard a whirr. I rushed out with the bottle in one hand and the corkscrew in the other, and voila! there was the aeroplane already in the air." "But how?--what..." "I do not know," said the farmer, with a shrug. "I only guess. The man who ran away must have hidden until your backs were turned, then come back and overpowered your comrade and flown away with him." "That’s very rummy," said Kenneth to Harry. "Ginger isn’t a man to be caught napping easily. What do you make of it, sir?" he asked the lieutenant in charge of the omnibus party, who had followed them. Kenneth repeated the farmer’s story. "Very curious," said the officer quietly. "The man wasn’t himself a flier, I suppose?" "No." "Well, I think we’ll run your farmer back to headquarters. It looks rather fishy: there are spies all over the place. You speak French? I don’t, more’s the pity. Just tell this fellow he’s to come with me." The farmer protested volubly, but the officer was inexorable. The omnibus party returned with their prisoner, and Kenneth and Harry tramped back in the twilight to their village. CHAPTER XII DOGGED There was great indignation among the men of No. 3 Company when Ginger’s capture was reported. Latterly the German airmen had rarely appeared behind the British lines; their experiences had usually been unfortunate. "Like their cheek!" grumbled one of the men. "And to carry off Ginger, too, after a lucky shot had brought ’em down. That farmer chap must have been a spy, and I hope they’ll give him what he deserves over yonder." The loss of the most popular man in the battalion was a blow to the Rutlands. And to be a prisoner they counted the worst of luck. Death they were ready for; to be wounded was all in the day’s work; there was not a man of them but preferred death or wounds to captivity, to be the mock and sport of a misguided populace, and the victim of brutal and barbarous guards. "And we can’t do nothing," growled a sergeant. "Lor bless you, when I think of the stories I read as a nipper in the boys’ papers, daring rescues, hairbreadth escapes and all that--what a peck of rubbish I used to swallow! And believe it all too, mind you. It all looked so easy. There was the prison, and the jailer’s pretty daughter, perhaps a file to cut away the bars, or a knife to dig a tunnel underground, or a note carried to a wonderful clever pal outside, or the prisoner dressing up in the gal’s clothes: gummy, how excited I used to get. Them chaps that write the blood-curdlers don’t know nothing about the real thing, that’s certain." Kenneth laughed.