“The Frenchman told me that a very well known pilot of the early days of the war, named Garros, invented the arrangement whereby a gun could be so mounted that the bullets went through the arc of the revolving propeller blades,” answered Joe.  “He said, too, that Garros had the bad luck to be taken prisoner, and the Germans got his machine before he had any chance to destroy it.  That was the way the Germans got hold of the idea.  Garros simply designed a bit of mechanism that automatically stops the gun from firing when the propeller blade is passing directly in front of the gun-barrel.  He placed the gun-barrel directly behind the propeller.  He then made a cam device so regulated as to fire the gun with a delay not exceeding one five-hundredth of a second.  As soon as the blade of the propeller passes the barrel the system liberates the firing mechanism of the gun until another blade passes, or is about to pass, when the bullets that would pierce it are held up, just for that fraction of a second, again.  So it goes on, like clockwork.  You have noticed that on the new planes all the pilot has to do when he wants to fire his machine-gun is to press a small lever which is set, on most planes, in the handle of the directing lever.  That small lever acts, by the mechanism I have told you about, on the trigger of the gun.  It is simple enough.”

“Yes,” admitted Bob, “it does not sound very complicated, but it seems very wonderful, all the same.  Most things out here are wonderful when you first run into them, though.”

Of the group of Brighton boys selected by the squadron commander to study the finer points of aerial acrobatics, Joe Little was the star, with Harry Corwin a very close second and Jimmy Hill a good third.  Their education, as the days went past, became a series of experiments that were nothing short of hair-raising to any onlookers save most experienced ones.

To see Joe, in a wasp of a plane, swift and agile, start it whirling like a pinwheel with the tip of its own wing as an axis, and fall for thousands of feet as it whirled, only to catch himself and right the speedy plane when lees than a thousand feet from the earth, was indeed a sight to make one hold one’s breath.

Jimmy Hill learned a dodge that interested older aviators.  Looping the loop sidewise, he would catch the plane when upside down, and shoot away at a tangent, head down, the machine absolutely inverted—–­then continue the side loop, bringing him back to upright again some distance from where he had originally begun his evolution.

Watching him at this stunt, a veteran pilot said to the chief one morning:  “That turn will save that kid’s life one day.  See if it don’t.”  And sure enough, one day, it did.

Harry learned what a French friend had told him the great Guynemer, king of all French fliers, had christened “the dead leaf.”  With the plane bottom side up, the pilot lets it fall, now whirling downward, now seeming to hang for a moment, suspended in midair, now caught by an eddy and tossed upward, just like a dead leaf is tossed by an autumn wind.