The sergeant who took care of the
telephone was hard put to it to coil down the twin wires. He skittered
about over the grass with the liveliness of a cricket.
Many soiled hands grasped the floor of our hamper and eased the jar of
its contact with the earth. Those same hands had redraped the rim with
sandbags, and had helped us to clamber out from between the stay ropes,
when up came the young captain who spelled the lieutenant as an aerial
spy. He came at a run. Between the two of them ensued a sharp
interchange of short German sentences. I gathered the sense of what
passed.
"I don't see it now," said, in effect, my late traveling mate, staring
skyward and turning his head.
"Nor do I," answered the captain. "I thought it was yonder." He flirted
a thumb backward and upward over his shoulder.
"Are you sure you saw it?"
"No, not sure," said the captain. "I called you down at the first
alarm, and right after that it disappeared, I think; but I shall make
sure."
He snapped an order to the soldiers and vaulted nimbly into the basket.
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