“I’m most grateful for having a photographer,” Charles agreed. “And you’ve done plenty of aerial work. So down here we have a mystery, or at least a news story, and if you look half way up from the horizon, that must be Venus.”
“Where?” Andrew asked.
“Straight ahead,” Charles answered. “About two hands up from the horizon, bright blue point of light.”
“Found it! Wow, that is bright!” Andrew responded.
“You sure that’s Venus?” Cornelius asked. “I don’t remember it getting that far north.”
“It’s right there,” Charles said. “Can’t miss it. But I agree, doesn’t look like Venus, which I’ve seen plenty of times in daylight here.”
The drone of the engine carried the Oriole swiftly northward. To one side, the gleaming rails of the Atchison line rose to accommodate the gentle slope. Dark green brush interrupted the soil’s pale tan. Parallel to the rails, lines of telegraph and telephone poles ran parallel to what might loosely have been called a road, its gravel a gleaming white.
“Something a bit interesting here,” Cornelius said. “Those occasional patches of bright yellow. I don’t remember them from other flights. It’s the wrong season for flowers.”
“Good eyes,” Andrew said politely. “When I was commanding an observation company, I kept stressing to my officers to keep their eyes open for anything out of the ordinary, because no matter how clever the Germans were they’d make an occasional mistake and give away where they were hiding or what they were doing. But I do go riding in the countryside occasionally, and I can’t remember ever having seen them either.”
“You have me,” Andrew said. “I grew up back east, moved out here, but I’m still strictly a city boy. I only twice fell for the editor’s instruction to go out to the end of town and photograph a camel herd. The third time I came back with photographs of cows and sheep and chickens. And then I snuck an ostrich photo into the middle of the pile of photographs, and he thought there was a loose ostrich out there.”
The other two men laughed. The Rising Sun was notorious for its clever April Fools’ Day hoaxes.
