"A bonnie shot," said Tam o' the Scoots complacently, and banked over as he turned for home. He shot a glance at the climbing circus and judged that there was no permanent advantage to be secured from an engagement. Nevertheless he loosed a drum of ammunition at the highest machine and grinned when he saw two rips appear in the wing of his machine. By the time he passed over the German line all the Archies in the world were blazing at him, but Tam was at an almost record height--the height where men go dizzy and sick and suffer from internal bleeding. Over the German front-line trenches he dipped steeply down, but such had been his altitude that he was still ten thousand feet high when he leveled out above his aerodrome. He descended in wide circles, his machine canted all the time at an angle of forty-five degrees and lighted gently on the even surface of the field a quarter of an hour after he had crossed the line. He descended to the ground stiff and numb, and Bertram walked across from his own machine to make inquiries. "Parky, Tam?" "It's no' so parky, Mr. Bertram, sir-r," replied Tam cautiously. "Rot, Tam!" said that youthful officer. "Why, your nose is blue!" "Aweel," admitted Tam. "But that's no' cold, that's--will ye look at ma altitude record?" The young man climbed into the fuselage, looked and gasped. "Dear lad!" he said, "have you been to heaven?" "Verra near, sir-r," said Tam gravely; "another ten gallons o' essence an' A'd 'a' made it. A've been that high that A' could see the sun risin' to-morrow!" He started to walk off to his quarters but stopped and turned back. "Don't go near MacBissing's caircus," he warned; "he's feelin' sore." Tam made a verbal report to Blackie, and Blackie got on to Headquarters by 'phone. "Tam seems to have had an adventure, sir," he said, when he had induced H. Q. exchange to connect him with his general and gave the lurid details. "It might be Hindenburg," said the general thoughtfully. "He's on the Western Front somewhere--that may explain the appearance of the circuses--or it may have been a corps general showing off the circus to a few trippers from Berlin--they are always running Reichstag members and pressmen round this front. Get Tam to make a report--his own report, not one you have edited." Blackie heard him chuckle. "I showed the last one to the army commander and he was tickled to death--hurry it along, I'm dying to see it." If there is one task which an airman dislikes more than any other, it is report-writing. Tam was no exception, and his written accounts of the day's work were models of briefness. In the days of his extreme youth he had been engaged in labor which did not call for the clerical qualities, and roughly his written "reports" were modeled on the "time sheets" he was wont to render in that far-off period, when he dwelt in lodgings at Govan, and worked at McArdle's Shipbuilding Yard. Thus: