Langdon felt fine. He climbed on the front man’s tail, broke the formation and tried to induce the bird to go “round and round”. The lead man was not looking for combat with a DH. He went into a dive and waved Langdon away. But the merry one followed. Then, with his power running wild, the retreating Nieuport flyer burned out his rotary engine. Langdon saw the propeller stop. Then he leveled off and started to climb back to the rest of the flight. A man with a dead engine is no man at all. One of the remaining four, when Langdon closed down on their rear again, deliberately killed his motor and went into a spin. The other three, somewhat bewildered, remained to mill a bit. But when Langdon’s propeller came near to biting chips out of one of their rudders, that Nieuport also called it a day. Enough is enough. Langdon saw the machine start down for a landing. Jack Langdon had discovered something. What had started as fun, took on the magnitude of worthwhile research. He had learned that a DH, rightly flown, could combat--could go round and round--with a _chasse_ plane. The remaining two Field No. 8 ships had followed their disabled mates to earth. Jack Langdon hung around to make sure that five safe landings had been made; then he laughed, sang a bit and looked about for new worlds to conquer. West of Bourges, he found a Farman “pusher” from the French school at Châteauroux. It was drifting along at eight thousand feet. Langdon came up from the rear and had his left wingtip nestled in close to the Frenchman’s outriggers, before the Châteauroux flyer noticed that he was not alone. Then a badly frightened face under a large crash helmet stared, wild eyed, across that short space. Langdon’s heart skipped a beat with the shock. The face under the helmet was a boy’s. “You damn’ bully,” Jack Langdon said to himself. “Get t’hell gone from here before you scare this game little frog to death.” He throttled his power, dropped his right wing and slipped away from the Farman. Then he turned back, headed into the last rays of the sun and cut for Romo’. There was joy in his heart, and he was making himself all kinds of fine promises. These DH’s, he decided, were not the poorest things in the air, and if a young fellow were to apply his best talents-- Well, chances were, he could manage to make himself felt. “Yes, sir,” he said, talking aloud. “I’ll talk with the riggers. See what they think about washing some of the incidence out of these wings. Bet with the outer wing bays washed flat, there’d be no drag and the old crate would swing around on a dollar. And that will speed her up a lot, too. No question at all. If we flatten these surfaces out, we’ll add eight to ten miles per hour. What _can_ be done, is _going_ to be done, or I’m a wet bird. In the meantime, unless they put the screws on me, I’ll combat everything that flies in this neck of the tall timber.”