Adventure, August 1917 — page 179: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

we 772”, S , Ep , > nee ae eg a . Za y ont . o* A) . NY 4 VANS AWD ys) tre’ ROM our American comrade in the British Flying Corps, a letter dated April eighteenth and telling of stirring deeds: I have been keeping your letter for months in hopes that I would be able to give you an address, but a permanent address seems as far away as ever. Every month they kept promising to send me back to England to train for my wings (Pilot Brevet) but as usual, they were only promises. HVENTUALLY, after crashing with a “dud” engine, crashed by a-a guns a month later, three very stiff fights in which we were always out- classed and outnumbered, I managed to drive off hostile aircraft while the pilot obtained some very important photographs. On the eighth of February I shot down an Alba- tross destroyer that couff make about one hundred and forty miles per hour while our machine could only make fifty-eight or sixty miles per hour, not being a fighting bus, then continued with our job for two hours on a machine that greatly resembled a colander. A COUPLE of days later an order came through General Headquarters to send me back to Eng- Jand as pilot and I jeft France February fourteenth and came here where J have been put through pre- liminary courses of wireless, machine guns, en- gines, map-reading, artillery observation, theory of flight and a great many other things, but man- aged to pass the examination with third highest marks in a class of about seventy, mostly all ofh- cers with university education and now am wait- ing orders to be posted to a squadron to do prac» tical flying on various types of machines. JF THE United States of America declares war, I shall probably come back as soon as my train- ing is completed here. In the meantime I should be very pleased if you would write me, at the ad- dress below. I was very lucky about getting sent back just at this time, as the casualty-list of my own squadron has taken up more than its share of space and a letter from my former flight commander tells me that there is something doing every day that he goes up, and that the anti-aircraft batteries make things rather lively when they cross the lines at ten thousand feet. HE strain of the last two or three months has turned my hair quite gray about the temples and they have not granted me any leave yet. re “A oe iF = & Se +" Grea 7 SN 5 Re P- FIRE. \ A MEETING-PLACE- ~ READERS, WRITERS end ADVENTURERS J 7) — == oe ss : > Io Altogether I have put in over two hundred and twenty hours of time in the air over the lines, which is just about enough when one stops to consider that the allotted life of a military pilot or observer is only five hundred hours. If he is not dead at the end of that time the nervous system breaks down. A man who has been over fifty hours without an accident is considered one of the devil’s own, and a man who has done a hundred or more is consid- ered a veteran at the greatest game in the world. Everybody seemed to ‘‘go west” except myself; all my pals have been killed or wounded, but I have not received as much as a pin-prick. Why? But this all must be a bore, so will ring off. —DEAN IvAN LAMB. BY OUR Camp-Fire custom James B. Hendryx stands up and introduces himself on the occasion of his first story in our magazine. It happens that he was born in the same little town that provided the world with my friend, Sinclair Lewis, formerly of Adventure’s staff, whose books and stories many of you have read. Mr. Hendryx, however, was a chum of ‘“‘Red’s’ older brother and confided to me the name he and that old brother used to apply to Red, alias Sinclair, alias Hal. No, I won’t tell it, but I prevailed upon myself without an effort to try it out on Lewis. He was low enough to meet it with a cheerful grin. I was born in Sauk Center, Minnesota. Attended the University of Minnesota for three years. Bought tan-bark through the mountains of east Kentucky and West Virginia for a year. Ran levels on the preliminary survey of a railroad that never went through. And then drifted to Mon- tana where I punched cattle in Choteau County for four years. Put in fourteen months in Alaska, and a couple of years in northwestern Canada. For the last seven years I have been engaged in newspaper and magazine work. My first novel “The Prom- ise,”’ is in its fifth edition. "THE newspapers have already told you of the death of our comrade Edmond Charles Clinton Genet on the French front in April. Through his letters to us of the Camp-Fire we had kept in touch with his experiences in the famous French Foreign 177 oO CoMmicbooks 5}