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Chapter IX - Dropped from the Sky

Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick, Royal Air Service, was on

reconnaissance. A report, or it would be better to say a rumor, had come to the

British headquarters in German East Africa that the enemy had landed in force

on the west coast and was marching across the dark continent to reinforce their

colonial troops. In fact the new army was supposed to be no more than ten or

twelve days' march to the west. Of course the thing was ridiculous--preposterous-

but preposterous things often happen in war; and anyway no good general

permits the least rumor of enemy activity to go uninvestigated.

Therefore Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick flew low toward the west,

searching with keen eyes for signs of a Hun army. Vast forests unrolled beneath

him in which a German army corps might have lain concealed, so dense was the

overhanging foliage of the great trees. Mountain, meadowland, and desert passed

in lovely panorama; but never a sight of man had the young lieutenant.

Always hoping that he might discover some sign of their passage--a discarded

lorry, a broken limber, or an old camp site--he continued farther and farther into

the west until well into the afternoon. Above a tree-dotted plain through the

center of which flowed a winding river he determined to turn about and start for

camp. It would take straight flying at top speed to cover the distance before dark;

but as he had ample gasoline and a trustworthy machine there was no doubt in

his mind but that he could accomplish his aim. It was then that his engine

stalled.

He was too low to do anything but land, and that immediately, while he had the

more open country accessible, for directly east of him was a vast forest into which

a stalled engine could only have plunged him to certain injury and probable

death; and so he came down in the meadowland near the winding river and there

started to tinker with his motor.

As he worked he hummed a tune, some music-hall air that had been popular in

London the year before, so that one might have thought him working in the

security of an English flying field surrounded by innumerable comrades rather

than alone in the heart of an unexplored African wilderness. It was typical of the

man that he should be wholly indifferent to his surroundings, although his looks

entirely belied any assumption that he was of particularly heroic strain.

Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick was fair-haired, blue-eyed, and slender,

with a rosy, boyish face that might have been molded more by an environment of

Tarzan the Untamed