But none of the four liked to start for home until he was sure the others of his group were all right and ready to come back with him.  The spotty clouds were responsible for a bit of delay.  Parker was nowhere to be seen.  Joe, Harry, and Jimmy circled round once or twice, undecided what to do, and at that moment Parker came climbing back from a dead-leaf drop, having shaken off his Boche pursuers, and gave the signal for the home flight.  Home they turned, and as they did so, four big Albatrosses, a section of the first group they had met, joined to two of the second group, came at them.  Without any concerted idea of action Joe, Jimmy, and Harry looped straight over simultaneously, every one of the three performing a perfect loop and coming right side up at the same moment.  Each of them, also, fired a round at the Boche immediately in front of him and made off for home at top speed.

Parker did a side-wing drop, and as he did so felt a sharp pain in his back.  His arms lost their power.  A bullet had lodged in his back, and worked its way, urged, perhaps, by the pressure of the boy’s back against the seat cushion, to some spot more vital than that in which it had first lodged.  From an apparently harmless wound, and certainly a painless one, Parker’s hurt had become so serious as to prove mortal.  For, try as he would, he could not move his arms to right his machine.  Down he dropped, mercifully losing consciousness as his machine shot toward the earth, and crashing, at last, so fiercely into the ground that naught remained of his hunter and its gallant pilot but a twisted mass of wreckage and a still form maimed out of all recognition.  Parker had paid the great price, after a gallant fight.

The other three hunters carried their pilots safely home, able to report that Joe and Jimmy had each accounted for one of the four Albatrosses that had last attacked them.

Three days later their squadron was moved back, and its place taken by a fresh unit.  Jimmy Hill was sent to hospital with his slit cheek, but was soon out and about again.

Less than a fortnight later all five of the boys, Joe, Bob, Jimmy, Harry, and Dicky, were on leave in London.  The night after their arrival on the English side of the Channel, Archie Fox, now a convalescent, invited them to dinner at the Royal Overseas Officers Club, where the six Brighton boys foregathered merrily.

Dinner over, Joe proposed a toast of “the folks at home.”  The boys drank it silently.  Then Bob Haines rose and raised his glass.

“Let us drink to the luck of the Brighton lot,” he said.  “May it never entirely desert us.”

As they rose and raised their glasses Dicky Mann added:  “May we always be ready to give that luck a fighting chance.”

Six strong right hands reached forth to grasp another of the six.  Six pairs of bright eyes flashed as each caught an answering flash somewhere round the circle.  Six hearts beat with the same stout determination as Joe Little voiced their united sentiments when he said in a low tone, “Amen to that.  We will.”