Soon Bob Haines drew the attention of the others to captive balloons along the sky-line ahead, and finally the Brighton boys saw a black smudge in the air far in front.  It was a minute or two before they realized that they had seen their first bursting shell.

The leading car turned sharply off the highway into a by-road at right angles to it.  A hundred yards further it dashed through a gap in a tall hedge, and as the line of trucks followed it, they emerged upon a great flying field.

There, ahead, were still the captive balloons, straining at their leashes probably, but too far away to show anything but the general outline of their odd sausage shapes.  Ahead, too, was the boom of the guns.  No mistaking that.  Their aeroplanes were to be the eyes of those very guns.  They knew that well.  The front line was up there, somewhere.  Their own soldiers, their comrades, were in that line.  Perhaps some of them were being shelled by the Boche guns at that very moment.

“Beyond our lines,” they thought, “come the enemy lines.  Soon, now, very soon, some of us will be flying over those lines, and far back of them, perhaps.”

To the credit of the Brighton boys, every one of the six of them felt a real keenness to get to work and take his part in the great game.  They had waited long and worked hard to perfect themselves for the tasks that lay ahead of them, up there with the guns and beyond.  There was no feeling of shrinking from the awful reality of actual war, now that it came nearer and nearer to them.  They were of sound stuff, to a man.

The wooden huts that were to be their homes for a time were clean and dry, and the big barn-like hangars that stood near had a serviceable look about them.  The level field that stretched away in front of the hangars was dotted here and there with a dozen planes, couples of men, or small groups, working on each one.  Before they realized it they were a part of the camp.

Immediately after dinner the flight commander sent for them and provided each of them with a set of maps.  All the next morning they pored over these, consulting the wonderfully complete set of photographs of the enemy country which could be found in the photograph department of the airdrome.

Practice flights took up the afternoon, and Joe Little and Jimmy Hill tried to outmaneuver one another at fairly high altitudes.

More than once Joe managed to get his machine-gun trained direct on Jimmy, but finally Jimmy side-looped with extraordinary cleverness, dashed off and up while still inverted, then righted suddenly and found himself “right on the tail” of Joe’s machine, i.e., behind Joe and above him, in the best possible position for aeroplane attack.  Joe had looped after a short nose-dive, hoping Jimmy would be below him when he pulled up, but the odd inverted swing upward that was Jimmy’s star turn had found him in the better position when the duel ended.