safe, sir?" he asked gravely. "I mean, with this officer along? He wouldn't get in my way, or anything?"

There was pin-dropping silence for a second, and then the Ready Room rocked with the roar of laughter that went up. Freddy went beet red to the roots of his hair and glared at Dave.

"Safe?" he shouted. "I'm jolly well the one who has to worry about being safe. Oh well, I've made my choice. I'll act the gentleman and stick by it."

"All right, all right, you two!" Group Captain Spencer called out as Dave opened his mouth to reply to that one. "Do the rest of your leg pulling in the plane. Man, how I pity the Jerry who takes you two prisoners. You'd drive the poor devil clean off his topper with your crazy talk. Well, anyway, that's that. You two, of course, are relieved of all other duties beginning with now. Meet me in my quarters right after evening mess. We'll do a little bit of plotting and planning, in case it should come in handy. Right-o, chaps, that's all. Dismissed!"

Three hours later Dave and Freddy were stretching their legs up on the flight deck. They had had mess and in a short time they would report to Group Captain Spencer in his quarters. First, though they felt they would like a stroll and a few words together. Since the drawing, they had not had much of a chance to be alone. Though they had been relieved of all duties, they had not merely sat back and taken things easy. They were real pilots, right to the core, and as soon as Group Captain Spencer had dismissed them they had gone below decks to the repair station to have a look at the Skua that had been hoisted aboard. An inspection of the plane, as the Victory's mechanics worked on it, had brought to light the true reason for the retractable landing gear's failure to function. As Freddy had guessed, bullets had parted one of the cables, and a free end of the cable had been whipped up by the propeller wash to catch in the retracting gear and jam it so that the right wheel couldn't go more than a quarter of the way down.

That, however, was not the most important thing they found out. Inspection also showed that both of them had come within three inches or less of becoming dead pilots. Bullet holes in the fuselage and cockpit cowling (or hood) showed clearly how narrow had been the margin by which death had passed them by. Two or three inches one way or the other and they would most certainly have joined their Junkers and Heinkel victims down in the gentle blue swells of the Mediterranean.

And now they were walking down their dinner along the long narrow flight deck of the Victory.

"In case you didn't get the idea," Dave said, breaking a moment's silence, "you sure gave me a sweet case of heart failure in the Ready Room this afternoon. No fooling, I thought sure you were honestly giving me the cold shoulder. Gosh! I didn't know what to think."

"Let it be a lesson to you," Freddy replied with a grin. Then, in a serious tone, "But I should be sore at you for even thinking I'd pick anybody else but you. After that landing you made? I should say not."

"Thanks," Dave said. "But I was scared stiff bringing that ship down. And between you, me, and the stern of this deck, there was an awful lot of luck mixed up in that landing. A couple of times I thought she was getting away from me. I'd sure hate to have to do it every day."

"Well, it was perfect," Freddy said. "A hundred times better than a landing I recall you once made in the English Channel."[1]

"You recall?" Dave scoffed at him. "How could you? You were out cold that time, and you know it. And, boy, when I turned around and saw you—!"

Dave left the sentence hanging in midair and shook his head as though to drive away the heart-chilling memory.

"Gee, it sure is different down here, isn't it?" he said, changing the subject.

"Meaning what?" Freddy asked.

Dave pointed a finger toward the east.

"The way day becomes night," he said. "Up north you have a couple of hours of twilight. But down this way you have only a couple of minutes of it. The sun goes down and then, bang, it's dark in nothing flat. I never realized that before about this section of the world."

"Well, it's a good thing when a pack of Jerries are on your tail, I fancy," Freddy grunted. "You can dive and lose them in the dark. And speaking of the dark, watch your take-off just before dawn tomorrow. Wouldn't be nice to crack us up before we get started, you know."

Dave turned his head and stared in amazement.

"Me watch the take-off?" he ejaculated. "Where do you get that stuff? You drew the marked slip. That makes you the pilot of the plane. Me, I'm the back seat driver."

"Oh, no, you're not!" Freddy argued. "I'm a very bright lad, I'll have you know. I know a pukka pilot when I see one. And I'm looking at you, see? Besides, I guess I never told you, but I'm a regular camera fiend. And the passenger works the camera. No, Dave, you do the flying. I'll take the pictures and try to bother you with back seat talk as much as I can."