Page:Air Service Boys Flying for France.djvu/152

Rh daring a Boche pilot to ascend and give battle. Another was striving to get above several sausage observation balloons that were rising back of the German lines, hoping to be able to drop a bomb with telling effect on one of the group.

These things always bring about fierce fighting in the air, and hardly a day passes without a number of machines on either side being shot down, the fate of their human occupants sometimes never wholly known.

Tom had not forgotten one thing. In his pocket he was carrying a letter from his American instructor, Lieutenant Carson, to his younger brother, who was flying for France in some capacity. He learned however that Philip Carson was not just then connected with the Lafayette Escadrille, though he was known to most of those who formed that corps.

Some time later on perhaps Tom might chance to run across Carson, for somehow Americans seemed to have a way of finding one another over there in France. Perhaps they were drawn together by a desire to chat in their own tongue: for but few of them could be said to be really proficient in the French language.

A score of things interested the boys from the start. As they as yet had no planes of