“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.

Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before she withdrew them in vexation—­hadn’t she promised herself not to be cowardly?—­to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to escape the high-angle guns of the Grays.

“We’ve got them all!  No lips survive to tell what the eye saw!” exclaimed Feller, his words bubbling with the joy of water in the sunlight.  “As I thought,” he continued in professional enthusiasm and discrimination.  “We are getting the theory of one feature of the new warfare in practice.  It isn’t like the popular dream of wiping out armies by dropping bombs as you sail overhead.  The force of gravity is against the fliers.  You have only to bring them to earth to put them out of action.  Plane driven into plane dirigible into dirigible, and an end of bomb-dropping and scouting!  War will still be won by the infantry and the guns.  Yes, the guns—­the new guns!  They—­”

Feller recalled with a nervous shock flashing through his system that he was a gardener, a gentle old gardener.  He put his hat back on a head already bent, while the shoulders, after a pathetic shrug, drew together in the accustomed stoop.  His slim fingers slipped under the largest chrysanthemum blossom, his attitude the same as when he had held it up for Marta’s inspection before they heard the roar of the Gray squadron’s motors.