William Le Queux

"The Zeppelin Destroyer"

"Being some Chapters of Secret History"

Chapter One.

Over a “Gasper.”

“To-morrow? To-morrow, my dear Claude! Why, there may not be a to-morrow for you—or for me, when it comes to that—eh?”

“Yes. You’re quite right, old son,” was my cheerful reply. “I’m quite aware that these experiments are confoundedly dangerous—and, besides, there are nasty wind-pockets about just now. I got into a deadly one yesterday afternoon, just across the line at Mill Hill.”

“I saw you,” replied my friend Teddy Ashton, a fellow-aviator and chum at Hendon. “It gave me a nasty moment. You had engine-trouble at the same time.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I was up over eight thousand feet when, without a second’s warning, I found myself in a pocket spinning over. Phew! If ever I nearly came to grief, it was at that moment!”

“I was on the lawn, having tea with Betty, and we were watching you. I quite expected to see you come plumb down,” Teddy said. “You righted your old bus splendidly.”

“She’ll have to have a new dope, I think,” was my reply, endeavouring to turn the conversation into another channel, for I did not care to discuss my narrow escape from death over the mishap which was certainly my own fault.

I was standing with Teddy in one of the long work-sheds of the Barwick Aeroplane Factory at Hendon on that bright morning early in October, 1915. The wind was light, the barometer high, and both of us had been up, as we had been testing our monoplanes.

As he stood leaning against a half-finished machine idly smoking a “gasper”—a cigarette in the airman jargon—he presented a fine picture of the clean-limbed young Englishman in his wind-proof aviation suit, with leather cap and ear-pieces, while his goggles had been pushed upon his brow.

Both of us, “as quirks,” had learned to fly at the same school 

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