Explore "Paths of Glory" by Irvin S. Cobb on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of an / anticlimax -- was bound to be anti-climactic. Yet the remainder of the / afternoon was not without action. Not an hour later, as we stood in a / battery of small field guns -- guns I had watched in operation from my / lofty gallery seat -- another flyer, or possibly the same one we had / already seen, appeared in the sky, coming now in a long swinging sweep / from the southwest, and making apparently for the very spot where our / party had stationed itself to watch the trim little battery perform.
It had already dropped some form of deadly souvenir we judged, for we / saw a jet of black smoke go geysering up from a woodland where a German / corps commander had his field headquarters, just after the airship / passed over that particular patch of timber. As it swirled down the wind / in our direction the vigilant balloon guns again got its range, and, to / the throbbing tune of their twin boomings, it ducked and dodged away, / executing irregular and hurried upward spirals until the cloud-fleece / swallowed it up.