Then a third explosion shattered the air, seeming to rise from directly
below. Bangs hesitated no longer. Ascertaining that his petrol was
still plentiful, he began gliding downward, over a hamlet or two,
mostly in ruins, then over a few small fields, and at last over the
scraggy trees. Suddenly he saw to the right a broad oval with what
looked like a battered wall around it. It might have been three to
four hundred yards in length, by half that in width.
The dim view perplexed him greatly as he flew, not more than from one
to two hundred yards above this singular ruin, completely surrounded,
as it seemed by forest, or the remains of forest.
All at once, gliding from out some deep shadows, something came rushing
along inside this oval, and stopped. A moment later it appeared to
rush again over the same course but in the opposite direction. All
this dimly came to Buck, swinging easily along overhead. Then it was
all clear to him at once.
"I'm certainly gettin' nutty," he owned to himself. "That's a plane.
Looks like a biplane and it's trying to rise. Why in Hades don't it
rise? Probably because it can't."
He knew that the Boche in his Taube had gone down considerably to the
northeastward. And the Taube was on fire. No doubt about that. This
was not a hostile machine, was it? Bangs did not feel that it was. He
had heard along that front tales of a big concrete oval, once erected
in the small Duchy of Luxemburg, close to the town of Arion, which town
was near a large area of forest.
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