Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 88: what you’re looking at

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

86 France and of Malagasy tirailleurs poured out of the trucks and formed in columns of fours, their long bayonets gleaming on their shoulders. The heav- ily armored truck kept on up the road in front of the marching infantry, its guns blazing a path ahead of it. Behind it came armored trucks with machine guns bristling from all sides. Near a bend at the rim of the plateau, rifle fire and the put-put of machine guns tore the French advance guard to bits. Some thirty men lay where they had fallen, riddled by the sleet of lead from the ambuscade ahead. “They'll cut them all down like rats if they try to go in there before they've paved the way with their 75s,” Bill said to Sandy. The kid’s eyes were as round as saucers as he watched the French in- fantry deploy to the sides of the road and move cautiously forward through the almost impassable jungle. ‘They ought to send a detachment around to attack from the other side,” he said. “They ought to. But they won't,” Bill replied. He -saw his own bomber circling high above the fort on the plateau. As it circled slowly it laid egg after egg—bombs—on the guns concen- trated within the inclosure. Shells burst all about it but only caused it to bounce in the air as though it had struck a series of air pockets. Then Bill saw something that made his lips come together in a thin, straight line. He saw two gray fighters whip into the air and begin to spiral upward. One of them stuck its nose toward the transport while the other took a course almost due east. Bull watched the sec- ond one with narrowed eyes. He didn’t believe the pilot of the plane flying to- ward him could see him because the sun was on his back. He continued to circle until the gray ship was over the rim of the plateau. Then he knew what it was going to do. ; BILL BARNES As the gray plane swooped low to strafe the advancing French infantry Bill pushed his stick forward and dove. The pilot of that gray plane was firing burst after burst of lead into the de- fenseless infantry when Bill clamped down on his triggers. The pilot of the enemy plane never knew what hit him. One second he was bent forward over his guns spraying the earth with lead. The next he was crumpled up on the deck of his cockpit and the gray plane was plunging at a fearful speed toward the jungle below. Bill waved a hand over the heads of the cheering Frenchmen below him and stuck the nose of the Stormer up again. He saw the other gray plane dart at his transport like a terrier snapping at the heels of a mastiff. It dove, spun and zoomed to avoid the guns of the trans- port and to get in a telling burst of fire. The transport continued to circle, drop- ping its bombs at intervals. The bombs were taking a deadly toll within the fort. Men lay all about inside the inclosure. Buildings were wrecked, guns demol- ished. Death was everywhere. Shells from the French 75s were roaring in at regular intervals now. Lit- tle trucks carried shells from the round building, which was the magazine, to the black gunners. Bill’s heart was sick at the thought that Shorty might be some place among those horribly demolished buildings. His stomach turned over and he tried to throw the thought from his mind as he took the thundering Stormer into bat- tle with the last of the little gray fight- ers. The pilot of this plane would be the one Red had fought with the day before. The scar-faced War ace who had fought Red to a standstill. AS Bill took one last look down and back to see how the French in- fantry were faring the gray biplane came hurtling down at him with its guns oO Comicloooks (C©