The volunteer scouts spied out the air as they did the roads. It was a volunteer who soared out in his bi-plane from New Bedford in Massachusetts that morning, when the newspapers announced the approach of the hostile fleet. He had learned to loop the loop for fun, fun being the great object of his gay though strenuous existence. Fortunate it was, indeed, that rich men had taken up aviation as a sport: for the enemy had come with aeroplanes counted not by scores, but by hundreds. And to oppose them, the American army and navy combined had exactly 23![21] Now it had happened that the few military airmen, attempting their scouting flights from the south and the west, had encountered unfortunate cloudless conditions, which quite prevented them from evading the far superior forces of hostile airmen. They had, therefore, been beaten back, continually, before they could pierce the screen. The volunteer, however, sweeping across the mouth of Buzzards Bay and out between the islands of No Man’s Land and Martha’s Vineyard, dipped into one of those drifting, isolated fogs that are born in the waters of Nantucket Shoals. Before a slow, lazy wind, the thick vapors went steaming and trailing out to sea, and he went with them. Occasionally he rose above the bank and looked out, like a man lifting himself from a trench. He had done this about a dozen times, and he was getting into the thin, seaward end of the fog-belt, when he saw ships. Instantly he went up, up, up. It was a racing one-man biplane. He thanked Heaven for its speed: for even as he was looking down on the ships, little things detached themselves from the decks and arose. They were specks at first, but in a moment they had grown. He watched them grow out of a corner of his eye, but with all his vision, all his concentrated attention, he looked at the fleet. There, surrounded by war vessels, he saw a long line of immense two-funneled, three funneled and four-funneled steamships; and he knew that he was the first American to see the troop transports of the enemy. _The News the Airman Brought_ He was turning in a sharp circle to flee even while he counted them. He was darting toward the coast, even while he still looked sidewise down at them to finish his count. Then, rolling and swooping as he put on the fullest speed of his racing engine, he fled, with five navy planes behind him, coming on the wings of their explosive storm. He wondered if they were firing at him. All that he knew was that his world just then was only one blur of whistling, strangling, smiting air and deafening roar. He struck a hole in the air and pitched sharply. He swept over the fog bank. It could not help him now. He dared not sink low enough to hide in it. Shining brightly in the bright air, he volleyed straight on as if he were going to dash into the blue wall of sky ahead.