ut thirty miles
south of 'B' lighthouse, my original course over Zabern of 270 deg. must
have been about right to strike 'B' lighthouse. So the green-ball
signal, as 'Mystery' said, must have been moved from Morchange to south
of Dieuze, and that is just what I was puzzling out when Dick answered
the puzzle for me. He's queer, all right." And Mac called for another
rum.

And "queer" is the best description of Dick that any of the Bedouins
could have given you, if you had asked them, until one night he was
finally coaxed after many "treats" to tell about his earlier war
experiences.

"In 1912 I was a subaltern in the Indian army," Dick said quietly; "a
row over a woman resulted in my court martial and disgrace.

"When the war broke out I joined as a dispatch rider; I was wounded and
was in the hospital for over five months. When I came out I succeeded
in getting into the Royal Flying Corps and eventually was granted a
commission. But as a pilot I was a complete failure; I 'wrote off'
several machines and in my last crash I nearly 'wrote off' myself. I was
unconscious for over a month and it was over eight months before I left
the hospital.

"I finally got back to France as a recording officer to a Handley-Page
squadron; here I ran into an old pal of mine, and one night, when his
navigation officer was sick, my pal took me on a raid without saying a
word to any one. It was the first time I had ever been in a Handley-Page
aeroplane and it was the first time I had ever flown at night, but my
pal was the best pilot in the squadron and the way to the Gontrode
aerodrome was an open book to him, for he had been there many times
before; he took me as a passenger for the experience.

"I remember as we 'taxied' over the aerodrome that the roar of the
engine on each side of me, the flashing of lights, the other machines as
they passed us or waited with slowly 'ticking-over props' for us to
pass, the different-colored lights which were being fired down from
machines already in the air and the lights fired up from the ground, all
combined and whirled through my excited brain like a meaningless
nightmare. Then there was a deafening roar and we shot down a path of
light, bumped hard, bumped less hard, bumped again, and the huge plane
with its great load of bombs was in the air. Lights on the ground and
the lights of machines in the air became mixed until I could not tell
one from the other.

"As we rose higher and higher, groun