This first Front line flight of Langdon’s was the quietest thing imaginable. Not an enemy craft crossed their skies. He wondered where these comebacks from the Front got all their stuff about dog fights, painted circuses and German infested ceilings. And as he followed Mudd, above territory that should have been bad, he recalled what Rube Williamson had told them, back at Issoudun. “Hun planes! Never saw a single Hun plane in two weeks’ flying. Maybe they’re there for some, but they were not there for me.” And now they were not there for Langdon. At the end of the eastward mission, Mudd, with the observations on the cuff, signaled for a turn and back home push. Then, for about ten minutes, Langdon kept the other two planes close in where they belonged and began to look about to see what he could see. They came above a road that was jammed with the properties of Germany’s late summer try. Without a great deal of thought, Langdon parted company, dropped down from Mudd’s six thousand feet elevation and went to strafing the enemy activities. * * * * * It was fun. It was war. It was more like it. He turned to his observer--a Lieutenant Akeley--and winked. Akeley stood up on his stool, bent over Langdon’s shoulder, and yelled: “Go back and give ’em hell! When you come in above that little burg where they were eating--where all the smoke was--sideslip and let me get a crack at ’em with my gun. Hop to it!” Langdon looked for his two companion planes. Mudd and the other had gone ahead. For a moment he might have hesitated. This thing of pulling a private strafe while detailed on a mission would not be considered exactly good. But being a strong youth, Langdon weakened. He flew a turn and went back along the German supply road. Where he found the field kitchens smoking, Langdon climbed to about five hundred feet. From that altitude, with the nose of his plane high, he slipped right and gave Akeley his chance with the rear gun. At the same time, watching his slip, he also watched Akeley and cheered the gunner above the roar of slipping struts and wires. At a hundred feet or less, he kicked out of the slip, redressed his ship, whaled full motor to the craft and flew across the concentration of troops--and through a hail of rifle fire ... Akeley went back to the Trente-Neuf a corpse in Langdon’s rear pit. At sunset, Jack Langdon sat upon his heels before a hangar, smoked, and tried to figure out the whole thing. Within the hangar at his back, under a tarpaulin, was the quiet Akeley. A short distance away, where the sun’s light was yet available, Trente-Neuf mechanics worked at patching thirty-seven holes in Langdon’s DH. The mechanics talked and wondered why that new bird, Langdon, did not get bumped too.