The Gay Triangle: The Romance of the First Air Adventurers
the car were speedily hooked up and drawn taut.

Then the two mysterious figures climbed again into the transformed car. There was a low, deep hum as the propellers began to revolve, the monoplane shot forward a few yards along the road, then lifted noiselessly, and, graceful and silent as a night-bird, vanished into the shrouding mist.

The adventures of the Gay Triangle had begun!

Dick Manton, lounging idly in the Assembly Hall of the little town of Fenways, in the centre of the Norfolk Broads, watched with eyes half critical and half amused the throng of dancers circling gaily to the strains of three violins and a tinkling piano which did duty for an orchestra when the youth of Fenways amused itself with a dance.

Dick was wholly and entirely a product of the war. The lithe, slim body, hatchet face, and keen, resolute eyes stamped him from head to foot with the unmistakable cachet of the airman. He smiled, as he watched the dancers, in acknowledgment of the gay greeting flung to him by a score of laughing girls who, with the joy of youth, were giving themselves unreservedly to the pleasures of the fox-trot.

Dick was a general favourite, and more than one pretty girl in the room would have been only too glad to arouse something more than a passing interest in the young airman, whose dare-devil exploits above the German lines in France had brought him the Flying Cross, whose brilliant career had been cut short by a bullet wound, received in a “dog-fight” above Bethune, which had rendered him unfit for the continual hardships of active service. He had been offered a “cushy” job in acknowledgment of his services. But Dick could not bear the idea of being “in the show” and yet not of it, and had accepted his discharge with what philosophy he could muster.

His chief asset was his amazing knowledge of motor-engines. They had been his one absorbing craze. While in the Army he had studied intently every type of engine to which he could gain access; he had read every book on the subject upon which he could lay his hands, and even among the expert pilots of the Air Force he was acknowledged as a master of engine craft.

It was this knowledge of engines which had sent Dick into the motor business. He knew, of course, that he could have obtained a good post with one of the big companies had he chosen to stay in London. But his nerves were still tingling from the stress of war, and he was still weak from the after effects of his 
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