see, and then we went back to the house.  I was walkin’ ahead with my Lord Marshalton talkin’ beginners’ golf. (I was the man who ought to have been killed by rights.) We cut ’cross lots through the woods to Flora’s Temple—­that place I showed you this afternoon.  Lundie and Walen were, maybe, twenty or thirty rod behind us in the dark.  Marshalton and I stopped at the theatre to admire at the ancestral yew-trees.  He took me right under the biggest—­King Somebody’s Yew—­and while I was spannin’ it with my handkerchief, he says, “Look heah!” just as if it was a rabbit—­and down comes a bi-plane into the theatre with no more noise than the dead.  My Rush Silencer is the only one on the market that allows that sort of gumshoe work....  What?  A bi-plane—­with two men in it.  Both men jump out and start fussin’ with the engines.  I was starting to tell Mankeltow—­I can’t remember to call him Marshalton any more—­that it looked as if the Royal British Flying Corps had got on to my Rush Silencer at last; but he steps out from under the yew to these two Stealthy Steves and says, “What’s the trouble?  Can I be of any service?” He thought—­so did I—­’twas some of the boys from Aldershot or Salisbury.  Well, sir, from there on, the situation developed like a motion-picture in Hell.  The man on the nigh side of the machine whirls round, pulls his gun and fires into Mankeltow’s face.  I laid him out with my cleek automatically.  Any one who shoots a friend of mine gets what’s comin’ to him if I’m within reach.  He drops.  Mankeltow rubs his neck with his handkerchief.  The man the far side of the machine starts to run.  Lundie down the ride, or it might have been Walen, shouts, “What’s happened?” Mankeltow says, “Collar that chap.”

’The second man runs ring-a-ring-o’-roses round the machine, one hand reachin’ behind him.  Mankeltow heads him off to me.  He breaks blind for Walen and Lundie, who are runnin’ up the ride.  There’s some sort of mix-up among ’em, which it’s too dark to see, and a thud.  Walen says, “Oh, well collared!” Lundie says, “That’s the only thing I never learned at Harrow!"...  Mankeltow runs up to ’em, still rubbin’ his neck, and says, “He didn’t fire at me.  It was the other chap.  Where is he?”

’"I’ve stretched him alongside his machine,” I says.

’"Are they poachers?” says Lundie.

’"No.  Airmen.  I can’t make it out,” says Mankeltow.

‘"Look at here,” says Walen, kind of brusque.  “This man ain’t breathin’ at all.  Didn’t you hear somethin’ crack when he lit, Lundie?”

’"My God!” says Lundie.  “Did I?  I thought it was my suspenders”—­no, he said “braces.”

‘Right there I left them and sort o’ tiptoed back to my man, hopin’ he’d revived and quit.  But he hadn’t.  That darned cleek had hit him on the back of the neck just where his helmet stopped.  He’d got his.  I knew it by the way the head rolled in my hands.  Then the others came up the ride totin’ their load.  No mistakin’ that shuffle on grass.  D’you remember it—­in South Africa?  Ya-as.