Pilots and ground crewmen crowded to the Hurricane. The sergeant-pilot slid back his canopy and stood high in the cockpit. With an angry gesture he yanked off his leather flight helmet. His voice boomed across the field.

"The fool!" he shouted, his face contorted with anger. "Who's the bloody fool who cut me out!" He climbed down and dropped from the wing. "Bloody stupid bastard! He could have wrapped up the lot of us with his stupidity!"

The other pilots looked at one another and shrugged. One stepped forward. "Look, Sergeant, no one but you out. We were watching you the whole time. You were the only machine working the airstrip."

"That's a bloody pile," came the heated retort. "What's with you blokes? Have you all gone blind? Of course someone cut me out!" He renewed his shouting, stabbing his hand at the runway, "Why do you think I went round again? And twice at that!"

An officer moved closer. "Seargeant-Pilot, what type of machine?"

"Why, sir, it was some bloody madman in a biplane. Just as I was crossing the boundary and easing into the flare, that biplane balked me. But before me just as I was touching down. Looked like a Tiger Moth, it did."

Silence met his words. By now the flight commander stood before the thoroughly agitated pilot.

"There's no one else flying," said the flight commander. "Besides, we don't have any biplanes on this station."

The sergeant-pilot set a famously stubborn jaw. "Sir, I knows what I saw, and I saw it not once, but twice, like I said, and that damned biplane was right in front of me!"

The group fell silent. Finally the flight commander gestured to his men. "That's enough for tonight. Pack it in, gentlemen."

The pilots and aircrews returned to their sleeping quarters. No one save the sergeant-pilot flying the Hurricane, and he was in the best position to see any other aircraft, had seen the mystery biplane. The story went round and round with the flight crews and mechanics and other ground crewmen, but in the press of combat and moving the Hurricane squadron to a new location, it was a report filed away and if not forgotten, at least relegated to an "odd story" category.

It didn't stay quiet too long.