"Right over there, Mr. Roque," he continued, indicating a summit a quarter of a mile distant, "is a rise exactly on a line west from where you started the other day to hunt for petrol--some twenty miles or thereabouts." "You ought to have a medal for accuracy, my friend," genially complimented Roque, "and I apologize for holding the suspicion at least once to-day that the snow had thrown you out of balance." "Can't blame you much, sir; I was mizzled a bit by too much white shroud back there. But here comes Ansel with the oil stove and the coffee pot, and we will have a brew that will reach all the cold spots under the vest." "You must have been born for this kind of business," piped Billy, viewing the food display on a blanket laid like a tablecloth and the steaming coffee pot topping the little camp stove. "I have had some experience in living in and out of an aëroplane," modestly admitted Roten, "yet I have seen days when I wished that I hadn't been born for this profession; hungry days, never-resting days, ever-perilous days. A sailor may be saved from shipwreck, a soldier has a fighting chance on the ground, but when an aëroplane goes too far wrong, just save the pieces, that's all." "Right you are, sir," earnestly declared Billy; "but get it in the blood once and there's no quitting." "By the way, speaking of military aviation, and the cold we have endured to-day, it is no more a question of climate in that sort of work. Why, Russia is away up in the hundreds in the number of its aircraft." "I expect that is true, Mr. Roque; I know I have met a few from over there myself," grimly conceded Roten. "Perhaps some that you will never meet again," suggested the secret agent. "Perhaps," said the veteran airman, reputed to have been mixed up in as many air duels as there were weeks in the year. Billy, chumming it with Ansel, Roten's pilot, had challenged the new friend for a footrace, which led the runners to the edge of the plateau on the north. Looking across the intervening defile, their attention was attracted by a movement on the opposite slope, the first sign of life below observed since they took flight from the Austrian camp early that morning. "There is something doing over there," panted Billy, not yet recovered from the exertion of beating his companion a foot or two in their speed contest. "I can't tell what it is, though," replied Ansel in broken English. "It might be a bear," surmised Billy. "More than one bear, then," claimed the Austrian, "for I just saw two of the kind between the bushes." "Your eyes are the better," conceded the boy; "there are two, one with a big hump on its back. I wish we could get over there." Ansel shook his head. "You can't cross there on foot. Too deep." "We can chase back and get the glasses anyhow." Billy was already on the way for the means of satisfying his curiosity. When the boy had secured the glasses and was hastening by the group around the little stove, Roque hailed him.