The central sections of the envelope of the rear dirigible had been torn in shreds; it was buckling. Clouds of blue shrapnel smoke broke around its gondola. A number of field-guns joined forces with a battery of high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was pointing toward the plain.
"And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising now--evidently already out of reach of our guns--and nothing against them!" he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry disgust. "Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What? What--" A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed, he cupped his hands over his eyes. "So, that is it! That is your plan, Lanny, old boy!" he shouted. "But if one of their confounded little aviators gets back, he has the story!"
From a great altitude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes descending across the track of the Grays.
"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home--between the badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is war--war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage, pray-and-swear courage--what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret! Now--now for it!"
The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course. But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.