User:SnowyCinema/P/Flying Death (Balmer)

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f=Flying Death.pdf
y=1927
oy=1926
loc=New York
pub=Dodd
au=Edwin Balmer
ty=novel

oclc=8811560
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{{c|
{{xxxx-larger|Flying Death}}
{{dhr|3}}
{{uc|By}} 
{{larger|{{uc|[[Author:Edwin Balmer|Edwin Balmer]]}}}}
{{dhr}}
{{uc|Author of}} ''"[[Fidelia]]", "[[That Royle Girl]]", Etc.''
{{dhr|5}}
[[File:Dodd, Mead & Co. Logo.png|75px|center]]
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{{larger|{{uc|Dodd, Mead & Company}}}} 
{{uc|New York}} — 1927
}}

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{{c|{{smaller block|Copyright, 1926 {{sc|By Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.}}{{dhr|10}}''Printed in U. S. A.''}}}}

-ded

{{c|{{sc|To Colonel [[Author:Robert Rutherford McCormick|Robert R. McCormick]]}}}}

—

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—2

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{{sc|A girl's gauntlet,}} of soft grey leather, gave the first hint of the true nature of the affair. Pete Logan picked up the glove in this peculiar situation./begin/

We had lost two pilots in two days; and they had been our best flyers. At ten o'clock, on Monday, Fred Selby had flown out to sea; and twenty minutes later, we found him under the wreck of his plane afloat on the ocean. At ten o'clock on Tuesday, Billy Kent had flown to the same place in the sky, when something Selby, and was killed.

We came upon Kent under the wreck of his plane in almost the identical position in which we had found Selby on the day before. It was off Cape May, about fifty miles at sea.

Pete and I, on this morning, had been flying separately when we sighted the wreckage and we both brought our machines down to the sea beside it.
{{nop}}

-4

Naturally, it gave us something of a start to see Billy Kent lying exactly where we had discovered Selby twenty-four hours earlier. Pete climbed aboard the wreck; and after making examination, he looked a bit white.

"What's doing this?" he asked me. "Selby yesterday; Billy today, at the same time, in the same place."

"Selby's wing crumpled from a structural weakness," I repeated, loyally, the report which had been officially rendered in regard to yesterday's accident. "Billy's must have been weak too."

"Are your wings weak? Or mine?" said Pete. We both had been flying seaplanes identical with Kent's. "You don't believe it; and neither do I. Structural weaknesses don't break wings in exactly the same place and at the same time in the morning on two days running. Something special happened to Selby out here yesterday and the same thing struck Billy half an hour ago."

He was repeating, with more positiveness, an opinion which he had voiced yesterday; this was, that Selby must have collided in the sky

-5

with another airplane or with an airship. The report, yesterday, disagreed with this opinion because no other aircraft had been damaged yesterday; none was missing. None had been seen in the vicinity. Moreover, Selby had been altogether too good a pilot to smash, midair, with another machine on a calm, clear morning. The same was true, today, of Billy Kent.

"You figure he ran into a rock up there?" I asked Pete.

"D'you remember," he put to me, "What Selby's altimeter showed yesterday?"

The altimeter was the recording device registering altitudes and it had given us Selby's height above the sea before he fell.

"Twelve thousand feet plus," I said.

"His gives twelve thousand slightly short," Pete told me. "That's where they both struck something hard enough to break off that wing." He pointed to the right wing of Kent's plane which floated a couple of hundred yards away.

"Let's look at it," I suggested; and Pete stood on my float while I started my engine

-6

and "taxi-ed" my plane on the sea toward the wing.

Half way there, Pete sighted the glove; he stooped from the pontoon and picked it up.

It was a girl's gauntlet, you could see at a glance. The shape of her hand was in it; for the grey leather, though soft, was heavy enough to hold the form of slender, pretty fingers.

I stopped and we searched for other flotsam; but there was nothing else on the sea.

"Well," said Pete, looking up from the glove in his hand and staring again into the sky. "How did this get here?"

"Somebody dropped it, of course."

"And just now. It's not soaked; it was floating with air in it. She couldn't have been by in a boat."

I nodded. Of course, in the half hour since Billy Kent had fallen, a boat could not have vanished. The glove had not been there before the crash; it was connected with the fall. Of that, Pete and I both felt sure.

"She was 'up'," said Pete.

Again I agreed. In half an hour, a person

-7

who had been 'up'—flying—might be a hundred and fifty miles away.

Pete folded the glove carefully and put it in his pocket.

Later, when we were on shore making report of the finding of Kent, Pete produced the gauntlet; but no one ashore made anything of it. They let Pete keep it; and the official report on Kent, as on Selby, discussed structural defects.

But on the next morning, at a few minutes before ten, Pete Logan put out to the east in his single-seater seaplane. I saw him, suspected that he was having a look at that patch of the sky fifty miles out and twelve thousand feet up; and I followed him, a minute and a quarter later.

At the speed he was flying, a minute and a quarter meant full six miles; for Pete took no stock in that report on structural defects. He pushed his plane to the limit. We were ten or twelve minutes from shore—fifty miles, roughly—when I lost sight of Pete, temporarily.

At best, he'd been merely a speck to me;

-8

for a monoplane racer, seen from the tail at six miles, makes no great mark on the sky. It's visible but you have to know exactly where to look for it and once you lose it, you can't pick it up again, except by chance. You have to search the sky not only from right to left but you have to look at so many levels for the speck.

Moreover, since it was morning, we were flying at the sun which swallows with invisibility everything caught in its glare. Pete, to me, had disappeared into the sun.

I rediscovered him, but not his plane, most suddenly and startlingly. There I was, rushing on at five miles a minute and imagining Pete was far ahead under the glare when, all at once, here he was in midair in front of me, suspended from a parachute. His seaplane had vanished; nothing else and nobody about; just Pete hanging there ten thousand feet above the sea and fifty miles out, with his white parachute ballooned over him.

He was turning slowly as he floated; and when he twisted toward me, he squirmed and pointed upward and eastward, straight into

-9

the sun. Of course I saw nothing but glare; but I knew that Pete Logan, our best pilot of all, had got "it" too. But Pete had managed to jump clear before the spinning fall of his biplane involved him. Pete, apparently, would survive and have something to tell.

I ran to the right of him, circled and gazed down. On the placid, sparkling blue of the sea was a white splash with a white circle swelling away from it. There, I knew, Pete's plane had plunged, as Kent's had crashed yesterday and Selby's before him.

Again I scanned the sky which was empty, except for Pete gently swinging on his cords as the morning breeze blew along his parachute. High up, much higher, at fifteen thousand feet drifted a few feathers of clouds; eastward, blindingly, glared the sun at which Pete gestured now and then.

While he blew along, he descended, of course; and I dropped, pointing my nose beyond the splash of Pete's plane in the direction he was being blown. My landing was easy upon the smooth sea of that mild June morning; and, looking up and taxi-ing slowly

-10

on the surface to keep below Pete, who was blowing steadily along, I managed to be close when he came down to his ducking. I had my float almost in his grasp as he came up, choking, with his huge white umbrella collapsed beside him.

"Dave!" he hailed me. "Did you see her?"

"Her? Who?"

My engine was shut off; Pete had a hand on the float and was pulling himself up, hindered by the harness on his back.

"That girl."

"What girl?"

"Who did it. She did it!"

"Did what?"

"Smashed me. What d'you suppose? D'you think I jumped for the fun of it?"

"You struck somebody."

"She struck me."

"How?"

"Rode for me; rode into me."

"Where?"

"Didn't you see anything?"

"Not till I found you coming down. I lost you a while. You got into the sun."
{{nop}}

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"She came at me out of the sun," he told me, swearing, and stood up on the float, shaking himself and catching breath. "And she got me; got me; and—near got me cold, too." Of course he was recollecting Selby and Kent. He couldn't see me, yet; he had to keep staring into the sky.

"It was a girl?" I repeated.

He gazed at me, four feet away from him, with eyes focused fifteen thousand. His goggles were off; I remembered that he had had them off when I met him, {{hinc|mid-air}}, pointing at the sun.

"She meant to get me cold, Dave, as she got—them."

"You think she got them?"

"Think?" He pulled at his pocket and produced the glove he had picked up near here yesterday, which he had showed at the inquiry, and which they had let him keep. "Remember this?"

"Of course."

"It's hers."

"Whose?"

"The girl piloting that plane."
{{nop}}

-12

"She was the pilot, was she?"

"She was the whole thing; nobody else aboard; she was alone."

He drew between his fingers the soft leather of the small, feminine gauntlet; he put a hand to his dripping hair and parted it with the habit of his of putting himself to rights.

"I had a glimpse of her first, Dave," he told me. "She's little, Dave; not too little; slim and young. {{bar|2}}it, Dave; I had a look at her and she's lovely. But she never looked at me till she rode me down."

"She couldn't have meant to ride you down," I objected.

"Oh, couldn't she? That's what I thought—till she hit me. That's why I couldn't dodge her."

"Where did she crash?"

"She didn't; she held the air. Flew off, cool as you like, after she knocked me spinning."

"She couldn't have counted on that," I insisted. Manifestly, any pilot intentionally riding down another must expect to fall, too.

"She counted on it," said Pete. "She'd done

-13

it with Selby and Kent. She had wings built to stand it."

"Stand what?"

"Smashing another and holding the air herself. She did it, anyway."

There was no arguing with him; what was done had been deliberate, he knew; and by the girl who had worn the gauntlet in his hand. He thrust it under his jacket and set to unbuckling his harness and collecting his parachute. He succeeded, I noticed, in holding his hands almost, but not quite, steady.

Overhead and behind us beat an airscrew and out from under the sun appeared a monoplane with pontoons for water landing. Pete ceased to haul at his parachute.

The monoplane was light blue, matching the morning sky. The leading edge of the wings was peculiar, making me imagine the possibility of individual design to survive a smash in midair. Otherwise the plane was trim and neat and narrow, modelled for quick as and speed.

"Pete swore softly. There she is."

The monoplane dropped out of the sky,

-14

levelled off at five hundred feet above us and circled, while the pilot looked down. It took the water a couple of hundred yards behind us and came skimming on the sea.

The pilot removed her goggles; her; for the pilot, as Pete had said, was a girl. She was alone. Gauntlets similar to the glove in Pete's possession garbed her slender hands. Pete stared at her and swore in whispers, repeating: "There she is."

At the same time, he brushed at his hair with his fingers, pressing the water out.

I doubt if he thought about what he was doing; it was wholly instinctive with Pete to appear his best before a girl. She might have knocked him from the sky, she might have sent to death Selby and Kent but she was feminine and young and unusually good looking; so Pete Logan would be personally presentable while he accused her.

Pete, tall and dark and debonair for all his dousing, stood on my pontoon brushing his hair back from his forehead as he watched her approach. There was always a good bit of the Celtic in Pete; it gave him dash and gal-

-15

lantry. The blue of his eyes always was dark under his black brows; but his eyes flashed when he was intent. He was very intent now. Pete, on that day, was not yet twenty-three.

The girl, I thought, was twenty. She brought up her plane with the water lapping at the pontoons; she pushed off her helmet, baring brown, glorious hair. Probably there in the sun and on the sea surface, she felt the hood unbearably hot; not impossibly, as she came close, she had an impulse to be at her best before Pete; and I realized that this might be irrespective of a fact as to whether or not, ten minutes ago, she deliberately had knocked him out of the sky.

"Is anyone hurt?" she inquired, addressing Pete and glancing away, for a second, at the wreck of his plane which flecked the smooth swells in the distance.

I left reply to Pete and he needed a moment to compose it. At last he said, curtly, "Nobody is hurt here this morning. Nobody was hurt here yesterday or Monday. They were killed."

He cast this at her with a fling which flicked

-16

deeper color in her cheek and, at the same time, appeared to puzzle her.

"Who was killed?" she asked.

"You mean you want their names?" returned Pete. "Well, the man on Monday was Frederic Selby; yesterday, it was Billy Kent."

"Oh!" she said and looked from Pete to me for more explanation, I thought. When I failed to extend it, she gazed at Pete again. He all the time was filling his eyes with her.

I wondered how he could hold to his accusation of her. I could not hold to it at all. She was scarcely a wing's length away from us, leaning forward a bit in the cockpit of her blue monoplane wondering about us, puzzled by us and concerned, if I could judge her fairly.

I realized that, probably, I could not; she was so lovely looking. She had clear, beautiful features, definite but gentle, too. Her cheeks just now were flushed from flying and also from the fling of Pete's imputation; but naturally she must have clear, lovely color. She had a flawless skin and large grey eyes

-17

of that grey which is warmer, in eyes, than any other hue.

The boyish jacket buttoned across her breast made her only more feminine; her slight shift of herself in her seat, the little motions of her hands, the hundred imperceptible trifles which tell personality all combined to make me like her. Like her? What is the word for it when, at sight of her, your heart hurries, you forget and want to forget everyone and everything else and wish nothing but increase and extension of the moment?

Pete, I was sure, had made some extraordinary mistake. I had never seen anyone less likely to have done, deliberately, what he accused her of. If there was any shadow of sense in what he said, it must be that accidentally, through lack of skill at flight, she had blundered into him. Indeed, Pete himself seemed almost able to contradict his recollection.

"You knew about them?" he asked, more mildly.

"I heard that they had fallen because there was some structural defect in their planes."
{{nop}}

-18

"They had no more structural defects," denied Pete, his tone hardening again, "than I had ten minutes ago."

"When you fell?" she asked in her clear, concerned voice. "You fell, didn't you?"

"Yes," admitted Pete, not knowing how to take that. "I fell. But I had the luck to be able to jump out."

"Why did you fall?"

I think that Pete was about to tell her when she brought her hands into plainer view and Pete and I saw again the grey gauntlets identical with the one under his jacket. He plucked it out.

"This your property?" he challenged her.

She looked at both her hands, which were gloved. "Why no," she said; but instantly corrected herself. "Yesterday I did lose a pair of gauntlets."

"Did you?" rejoined Pete, his recollections clear in his head again. "Sorry I can't return the pair to you; but we found only one." And he flung it to her.

She caught it and examined it, while we watched her. She recognized it immediately,

-19

I thought, and kept staring at it, not thinking about it but about something else.

"That yours?" demanded Pete.

She looked at Pete, at me, and at Pete again with her lovely, puzzled eyes. "It's my size and I lost a pair," she said. Suddenly she claimed it. "Yes; it's mine. How did you get it?"

"I found it here yesterday, about this time."

"Here?"

"The neighborhood was furnished a little differently yesterday," said Pete. "Kent's plane—the wreck of it—was floating over there just about as mine lies this morning; but yesterday there was a pilot under it. Over there was a wing of Kent's plane—which hadn't broken off from structural defects. The third item of interest was the glove which we found floating half way between. It's yours, you say?"

Her grey eyes, gazing at Pete, were less puzzled; they were more something else. More frightened, it seemed. She seemed, at that second, to have caught some idea which frightened her. Her jacket collapsed with the

-20

emptying of her breast and then filled with her breathing.

"Yes; it's mine," she gasped.

"Did you drop the other here on Monday?" Pete was at her again. "If you did, we missed it."

"Monday!"

"I mean when Selby crashed—not from structural defects."

"What made them fall?" she put to Pete, directly.

"The same thing, I have no doubt," he returned as squarely, "that sent me down."

"And that was?"

He laughed at her. Of course it was not really a laugh; but there is no other word for it.

She looked at him, at me, at him; then suddenly she sat straight; suddenly she acted. She flung at Pete the glove. He stooped to catch it and she started her engine and moved away.

"Wait!" commanded Pete.

She paid no attention to him. He yelled to me to stay with her and he stepped out of the way of my propellor. But with him on

-21

the pontoon, I had to give her a long start. He had cast off his parachute harness but it entangled the float and had to be cleared. So she was rising into the air before we moved.

Pete yelled at me that there was no doubt she did it and to keep her in sight. He climbed on my right lower wing, lying as close to the center as possible to avoid throwing me off balance as I climbed.

The blue monoplane swept above us and I slanted up steeply as I could. I did not feel the certainty which filled Pete, but my muscles drew with doubt of her. Something was strange about her. What suddenly had frightened her when she had identified the glove; what so quickly had transformed her when he laughed?

She was steering for the sun with the idea, I thought, of vanishing in its glare. Perhaps she supposed that she had succeeded at this when she swung to the right, still climbing, and circled landward.

I swung about, copying her curve, two miles behind her and five thousand feet lower. Higher than she, perhaps a mile above her,

-22

spread a thin, tenuous ceiling; the feather clouds of a few minutes ago had widened to white patches half covering the western sky.

On the sea, far below, slipped purple shadows split by gleaming streaks of the sun which struck through the rifts in the cloud ceiling; on the sea stretched a long, black tendril of smoke trailing a boat bound for Bermuda, probably; on the sea, shoreward, showed a sharp, narrow seed—a steamer, properly stoked, bearing along the coast. In the shimmering sea behind us, the speck of Pete's plane was swallowed.

I thought of it falling twelve thousand feet and Pete in the air under his parachute; I thought of Kent sent down, yesterday, with one wing cracked off; of Selby spinning into the sea on the morning before; I thought of the girl who just now had been in the sun beside us on the sea; and I could not picture her deliberately flying at Selby and Kent to send them down. But I could not picture her sending down Pete, either; and he had said she had done it.

Of Pete now I could see only his heels.

-23

My seat was aft the wings; and Pete lay on his face upon the lower wing, clinging to the leading edge, with his heels out behind. The upper wing screened him from me but for his feet. He lifted them quickly in a kick, as though he knew I was looking and he meant to tell me he was all right and I was to go on. But I thought again, as I glanced at his heels, that he must have made some monstrous mistake. Why would that girl have tried to kill him? Yet, if she had not, why would he have said so? How had her glove happened to be, yesterday, beside Kent?

My idea that she might, from lack of skill, have blundered into Pete's plane no longer was tenable. She evidenced no lack of skill at flying. Higher than we and far ahead of us, she continued to climb until at last she touched the ceiling and went through.

She vanished. No; here she was again, diving, pointed not away from us but toward us. I heard a yell and Pete's heels kicked violently. He had seen her, returning. I put to the right and she put to the left and was at us.

No doubt at all, whatever had been my

-24

previous idea, that she flew at me. She flew differently from before; she dashed at me in short, sudden stabs of flight, sharply shifting direction as I avoided her.

There is character in flight, as there is in every human action; every pilot has a style of his own, corresponding to his character; and her style and character, in those few seconds she had been above the clouds, completely had changed. She had been flying swiftly but smoothly with long, graceful sweeps through the sky. Now she darted in short, ugly, sudden strikes at me to send me down as she had sent down Pete half an hour ago; and as she had dropped Selby and Kent. No longer did I question that. Hot blood beat in the back of my head. I knew, as I met her, I must {{SIC|manoeuver|manœuver}} for my life and for Pete's. For she, if she could, would send us down.

-25

{{sc|I had}} my parachute folded in its neat, dry pack at my back; but Pete's was in the sea. If she struck us and smashed us, I might leap free; but Pete would drop like a plummet.

I dodged her, steering wider to the right; and with another swift, stabbing spurt's he flew for us. I put nose down and dodged; and nose down, and diving, she stabbed at me; but she nose-dived a hundredth of a second too late to strike. I was under her feet. No possible relic of doubt of her intent; none. She had tried to smash me. There was no use and I had no second of respite to wonder why. The fact completely engaged me.

For the moment, I had forgotten Pete in saving myself. Now I did not consciously in recollect him. I looked over the side and caught sight of his feet. There he was, still safe; but his feet were twisted. He had half turned, as he clung to the wing, and was looking back.
{{nop}}

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Behind us and below was the blue monoplane turning upside down as it went into a "loop." I could not now see the pilot; but an image of her, photographed in the split of a second when she had dived at me, developed in my mind. I saw her small, helmeted head, a hue of her hair on the pink of her cheek; goggles over her eyes; her grey gloved hands were on the controls.

She had arrested her descent, after having dived past me, by going into the "loop." Though it turned her upside down it was the quickest way to bring her plane about under me to follow me. Of course only a good pilot, with excellent nerves, could do it.

She flew below me, upside down, showing the blue undersurfaces of her wings as she followed me. I watched her; and had a moment for amazement. Against myself I argued that the pilot could not be the lovely girl who had spoken to us on the sea.

That blue monoplane, flying upside down, righted itself; it turned over, on the wing, and gave me good view of the pilot. I saw her slim shoulders, her slim arms, her grey gloved

-27

hands, her small, helmeted head. She never moved her head; she never looked up at me; but she began climbing, aimed at me. Climbing, she gained on me; she had the wings of us; she had the better plane.

I went to the left and for a few seconds my shift of direction seemed to escape her. Then, without looking up at all, she veered to the left in one of her queer, sudden stabs and climbed closer to me.

She seemed bent on striking at me from below.

The madness of such a purpose no longer denied it in my mind. I had to think of her as mad, that girl who had flown down to us on the sea and now, having drawn us fourteen thousand feet into the sky, attacked us. The sea, nearly three miles below and with the vessels veriest specks upon it, spread beneath me as a floor upon which I must fall. Sickeningly, it spread beneath me. It was a moment when the sensation of height, which a pilot learns to ignore, re-imposed itself upon me. My palms sweated cold; I could feel the sweat on the soles of my feet. Struck, as Selby

-28

and Kent had been struck, I would fall spinning, faster and faster each second; faster a thousand feet down; two thousand; a mile; yet another mile to fall, spinning; still another mile of nothing below.

I twisted my shoulders to feel the pack of the parachute. I might leap clear, as Pete had done. But he could not do it again; and neither Selby nor Kent had been able to, from a plane sent spinning.

I looked down at the girl. She was mad—and something more. It was at this moment, when she made a stabbing swerve to follow me, without looking up, that I began to feel the cold tingle of the sensation that mere madness was insufficient to explain her. I had encountered something more remarkable than mere madness in the sky.

I was flying, with full throttle, for the cloud ceiling. I was giving my engine all I had. For the clouds, with their layers of concealment, displayed the best chance of escape. I might dive and dodge; but Pete was on my wing, there was three miles of the clear below us to the floor. I preferred to race her for

-29

the ceiling; I went through and came out on the other side.

For a second I had the sky to myself; the ceiling was become a floor of soft, gleaming float through which suddenly shot the blue monoplane with the helmeted girl in the cockpit.

Then occurred the amazing, revealing thing. She was beside me but she paid no attention whatever to me. It was as if she did not see me, as if the thrust through the cloud had blinded her—or again completely changed her.

She flew past, making no strike at me; and, as I watched her, an idea like this ran in my head. She had been normal when she had been with us on the sea; it was after her dive through the clouds that she had altered and flown amuck. Had her return through the cloud restored her?

The change in her was as utter as that.

There she was flying off straight and evenly, as sanely as anyone. But now—now, in one of her short, ugly stabs, she banked and was about at me.

I dodged to the left; and at first she made

-30

no change in her course; then she stabbed to her right. I put about, watching her; and again, after a half second, she shifted so tardily that I avoided her easily and she passed us, looking neither to right nor to left. She never moved her head; she stared straight ahead.

I caught a glimpse of Pete's legs tense, twisted, more excited, even, than before. My eyes went to her and I saw her banking but never moving her head. How queer that motionless helmet! Then, less from what I actually witnessed in that flash than from a sudden culmination of memories of all the last minutes, I began to know what we were against.

It was no girl who had flown at me to knock me from the sky; it was no girl who had sent down Pete and had killed Selby and Kent yesterday and on the day before.

Nor was it a man, flying amuck, who piloted that plane. It was nothing human at all. It was an automaton. The pilot, goggled and helmeted and gauntleted, was in the image of a girl—indeed, in the image of the girl who

-31

had talked with us on the water—but the image was lifeless. It was of steel and wood and wax.

The pilot of that mad, blue monoplane was an effigy. It was nothing with heart or with mind; it was nothing of flesh and blood; it was nothing mortal. It was a mechanism.

Of course, I knew that a mind must direct it; but the mind was removed at a distance, controlling the monoplane by radio, endowing it with an immunity to consequences and with a mercilessness far beyond mere madness.

-32

{{sc|The}} meaning of the circumstance that it was made in the likeness of the girl—that it was her effigy—could not then come to me. I could not think of that at all. The fact that it was not the girl, but her effigy, was more than enough.

The principle of the mechanism, now that I realized it was a machine, of course was familiar to me, I, myself, had taken part in tests of contrivances aimed at the perfection of mechanical control which now I witnessed.

I had seen mechanical controls installed in the cockpit of a navy airplane; but a living pilot had sat beside the mechanism. I had seen the pilot take his hands from his levers, after the plane was in flight, and give over the controls to the mechanism; and I had watched the airplane fly and turn to right and left and climb or dive at the direction of a radio operator on the ground or in an accompanying airplane. But the movements of the

-33

plane, when piloted by the mechanism, always had been constricted; and the mechanism never had been independent. It could not fly solo; always a pilot had been beside it to lend a hand.

This mechanism, masked by the effigy of the girl, surely employed the same principle but had brought it to such perfection that only now had I realized it. Pete, I guessed, had realized it only a few moments earlier.

Now, of course, I comprehended the fate of Selby and of Kent and I knew what Pete had encountered. Each of them, flying, had come across a girl pilot—or what had appeared to be a girl in the cockpit—and she had dashed into each of them, in turn, before he could see she was a mechanism.

An automaton, controlled and commanded by whom? By the girl, whose effigy masked it? By the lovely, gentle girl herself who had talked to us on the sea?

The strange meaning of the circumstance that it was made in her likeness could not, I say, yet occur to me. I could not yet consider that this had meaning. I was applied to

-34

desperately practical things. Who manœuvered the effigy?

Not the girl herself, I realized on second thought. For this mechanical airplane must have been kept in the air, above the clouds, while she was speaking with us on the sea. However perfect the mechanism under the dummy, it could have sustained the plane in the air only under the constant direction of the operator of the radio control. The girl could not have been the operator. She could not have manipulated radio controls while she was talking to us. There must have been another person operating the radio controls; and those controls and this other person must be in a third airplane.

He must have been hiding above the clouds with his mechanical slave circling him like a satellite until he sent the effigy down to attack us after I had followed the girl into the sky. So her rôle, then, was that of a decoy? Had she decoyed first, in her own person, Selby and Kent and drawn them into a situation to be destroyed, in one sudden dash, by her effigy?
{{nop}}

-35

The idea did not satisfy me. Vaguely I was feeling, with nothing yet approaching mental realization, that there was something far more strange than that.

The effigy flew on lines parallel to my course, offering no attack and coming no closer. Again it ignored me. Now, of course, I comprehended this phenomenon. The effigy could not see me; the eyes, which piloted it, peered from the cockpit of a control airplane.

At the origin of the attack upon me, the control airplane must have circled above the ceiling with its slave; after the control had dispatched the slave and after it had engaged me, the control must have descended below the clouds to have both me and its slave in view. When I had climbed through the ceiling, the control airplane had sent the effigy up after me but the operating pilot was behind and below. He lost sight of me and of his automaton. Therefore, the effigy had flown beside me and past me, paying no attention to me until the control machine cut through the clouds and caught sight of us again.

Evidently, at the present moment, I was

-36

screened by some scraps of clouds so that the pilot of the control plane could not keep me in sight. I did not immediately discover him; I saw nothing but clouds, chasms through them here and there, and the blind, deaf, insensate, utterly merciless mechanism.

When it jerked toward me, in one of its stabbing spurts, I understood that the control pilot must have caught sight of me; and sweeping the floor of clouds I sighted him far off to the left and on the opposite side of me from the effigy.

His craft was a monoplane with blue wings like the wings of the effigy and of the girl who had stopped on the sea.

I dipped into a valley of mist; and the effigy charged through the cloud, failing by a hundred yards to find me.

I knew I had dropped from view of the control pilot who had pulled the effigy toward me almost at random. Little or no danger to Pete and me from that manner of manœuvering.

The clouds blew their billows above and below me, offering endless chasms of conceal-

-37

ment. Occasionally, for a few seconds at a time, the control pilot might have me in sight; but he seemed to require a clear view for several seconds before he could effectively direct the mechanism at me.

He, I was saying in my mind when reckoning with that pilot. I did not pass close enough to see him; but it was a man, I felt certain—a man who had sent down Selby and Kent and Pete.

A man piloted that control plane and aimed the mechanism; a man had made and to his purposes employed the effigy of that girl.

Why?

The idea of mere escape no longer appealed tome. I looked over the edge at Pete's legs and knew that he expected of me more than escape.

—38

-39

—40

-41

{{sc|Above}} the floor of clouds, which had been our ceiling, another ceiling spread and I flew up to it, pursued by the effigy. I went through this ceiling and the effigy burst through after me, blind as before.

This time it remained blind; the control did not follow it up. He remained below and soon recalled the effigy. At least, the plane dived through the clouds, leaving me alone.

I skimmed over a crack in the ceiling, peering down. There was a blue monoplane with a living pilot; there was the monoplane of the mechanism. The pilot shepherded it upon his own level, five hundred feet below the ceiling. He sent the effigy a thousand feet ahead of him where he let it lead him as though on an invisible leash. They went away to the west.

I gazed about for bearings. Land was in sight. What land? I studied shore contours while I followed the monoplanes. There was the turnip-shaped bulge of Great Bay; there

-42

lay the straight key of Long Beach; there was Atlantic City. We had whirled to the north, as well as landward, in our manœuvering.

The pilot, with the effigy on its long, invisible leash, led to the right—to the north—of Atlantic City. No other airplane was in sight at this moment. The blue monoplane of the girl who was the original of the effigy, had vanished.

I realized that I had had no glimpse of her since she had flown into the ceiling at the moment before the effigy was discharged at me through the same clouds. Having played her part in the plan of this morning, she had gone home, I supposed. The control pilot, with his mechanical slave, must be headed for home. Whether or not he would have chosen to remain, stabbing at me with his mechanical slave, he could not. He had to have fuel.

My fuel gage was bobbing altogether too near "empty". And I had rested on the sea with engine stopped, for several minutes since I had left shore. The blue monoplanes must have left their station before Pete and I flew

-43

from ours; constantly they must have been in the air, burning fuel. Yes; beyond doubt they were forced to go home.

They led me over breakers and the beach. Forty seconds or three miles ahead of me they flew, cutting across the narrow neck of New Jersey toward the Delaware and Trenton. Inland they led me; so their landing place was on some lake or river or pond.

Slowly they stretched the space between us; they had the speed of me. Still I held them in sight, two specks over the horizon, throughout the ten minutes we took to cross New Jersey. On over Pennsylvania they flew.

Now I could scarcely see them. Probably they could not see me at all; for, since they flew northwest and I followed, the sun was behind me.

Suddenly they appeared more plainly to me; suddenly I succeeded in gaining upon them. The explanation was simple; they had reached their goal and were circling, preparatory to descent. So I rushed up on them, a mile nearer every twelve seconds.

I saw, then, a third speck rise above the

-44

ragged contour of hills and join them; a third plane was in the air, associating with them. The girl again?

I became able to see them not as specks but as monoplanes with wings and tail and pontoons—and pilots. The plane, which had arisen from some hole in the hills, closely accompanied one of the others.

Whether this one was the pilot plane or the slave machine, I could not see; for I could not distinguish them. I could keep the third airplane, newly arisen, separate from the other two; that was all.

The third plane put itself directly above the one which it had chosen for its attention; and, as I rushed up, I saw a speck, which was a man, descend from the upper airplane to the lower.

This told me which was the slave machine. It told me, too, that though the automaton, by radio direction, could fly and manœuver the monoplane, it could not make the delicate manipulations necessary for the landing; a living pilot must be put aboard. So the third

-45

airplane had risen with an extra pilot and transferred him in the air.

The monoplanes separated; all three descended and disappeared. I flew over the hole in the hills and discovered a little sparkling ellipse of a lake with a wide spread of green sward, with the parallelograms of gardens and roofs beside it. Scurrying upon the lake, like three pale blue water-bugs, were the seaplanes just descended.

I circled, looking over the edge and noticed Pete's legs again.

"Go down," they signalled to me. "Go down."

Go down was what I wanted to do; but before going down, I must reckon a bit. Once down upon that pond, beside the three blue water-bugs, it was exceedingly doubtful that ever I would rise again, except with the {{SIC|water-bugs|water-bugs' }} consent.

In the sky over the sea, the business of two of those blue water-bugs—perhaps the busi—ness of all three, for the third might be the girl's—had been, this morning, an endeavor to destroy Pete and me. Follow them down?
{{nop}}

-46

"Down!" kicked Pete's legs at me.

I considered my fuel gage. Empty; empty, it warned me. My carburetor was not yet coughing from lack of gas; I had gas for a minute or two. But then I must make, whether I chose it or not, a forced landing. Where?

Where in the hills, except in the little lake of the three blue monoplanes, was water for my pontoons?

Down!

The girl of the grey eyes and the gentle voice, the girl of the brown hair and clear cheek, the girl of the slim, gauntleted hands who had spoken to us on the sea, she undoubtedly was below; she and her effigy.

I can not claim that, as I circled above the lake, any true clue to the meaning of the remarkable phenomenon of the effigy, came to me. Yet it was the fact of it which, more than anything else, drew me down.

In a moment, following a dive which suddenly magnified to exaggerated proportions the miniatures we had seen from the sky, we were levelling over the lake. My pontoons touched; spray flew. We were down.

-47

{{sc|I steered}} so as to come to a stop nearly in the center of the lake which proved to be an ellipse of deep water about half a mile long and a couple of hundred yards across.

The fact of coming to a stop, after our flight, brought a certain relief in itself, regardless of the situation about us. The rush of wind, at the rate of three hundred miles an hour, was ceased; the airscrew was silent; we had the feeling of firm water below us; and communication between Pete and myself, impossible when we were flying, suddenly existed again.

Pete let himself down, as he looked around; once more, as when we had been at sea, he stood upon my float.

"Quite a place," he said to me. "Quite a place." And he took off his goggles to have a better view of it.

"That wasn't the girl," I said to Pete. "You saw what it was?"
{{nop}}

-48

He nodded, without looking at me.

"Her in wax. What a scheme; what a scheme!"

"Radio control," I added, needlessly. Of course he had made out all that I had.

"Somebody made a neat change of cars," he replied, and gave his particular attention to the three blue monoplanes.

They rested in a row upon a bit of beach a hundred yards away on our right, which was to the east. No one attended them; no one stood by on the beach. The cockpits of the three were equally empty.

"They've taken out the dummy," said Pete.

Beyond the beach rose a rank of trim white painted hangars for housing a dozen machines. To the right was a run of lawn leading to the green sward which I had seen from the air and which was broad and flat enough for a landing field. Further back, the ground sloped and there was a large, square-sided, practical-looking building, with many windows, which might be a workshop. Back of this were trees and a hill.

Trees and hills ringed the ellipse of the lake

-49

around to the west where, at the water's edge and abruptly above it, towered a tall broad rock upon which was built a great gay mansion.

It was of white stone with smooth, round towers topped with lofty, graceful, conical roofs. Copper sheathed the cones; copper, gleaming in the sun, formed the surface of the slopes of the main roof. Tall, mullioned windows, in pairs and tiers, looked out from the walls and pierced the towers. It was like a French chateau; definitely, indeed, it reminded me of the great mansion known as the "water-lily"—Azay-le-Rideau. Someone here had raised a replica of the water-lily mansion for his summer dwelling.

In the calm and quiet of this warm, sunny forenoon, it brooded above the lake as though it had always been there.

People appeared on the terrace before it. From a chimney in the rear, a vague haze spoke of kitchens preparing a midday meal.

The ripples from the splash of our pontoons reached the rock, and, in the stillness, voices returned to us. Our voices, we realized,

-50

likewise would run to them over the mirror of the lake. So Pete and I exchanged our ideas in whispers.

"The place appears to be all under one management," said Pete.

Plainly, indeed, the mansion and the opposite beach, with the three blue monoplanes and the sheds and workshop, must be associated. I traced, through the trees, the sheen of a white road circling the lake from the square building on the east to the great house opposite. I caught the flash of a motor-car scurrying between the trees.

"Headquarters," said Pete, "seem to be at the big house. They're on the way to report. Suppose she's in the car or at the house, waiting for them—and for us?"

I shook my head which could form no clear picture of her place here.

"Shall we try to go up again?" I asked Pete. "We've a quart of gas, maybe."

Women appeared on the terrace; women's voices floated over the water; a girl's laugh rippled to us. Hers, I wondered? I did not think it hers; I did not like to think it hers. Pete was perfectly willing to suppose it hers;

-51

though he knew, now, that not she herself but her effigy had attacked him, yet he completely accused her.

"Let's play out the string here," he said; and we drifted, swinging slowly with the slight current in the lake.

The staccato of a motor cracked over the water; and a small white launch emerged from a cove on the side by the beach. A crew of two, in white ducks, manned it. They were servants, we saw, as they approached and slowed beside us.

"Want a tow, sir?" one asked me, respectfully enough, offering a line.

"Toss," bid Pete; and he caught it, whereupon he inquired, "Which side you taking us?"

"Which side, sir, do you want to go?"

"Take us to the house," said Pete and made fast the line.

The little launch towed; and from the terrace, a girl descended by a stairway to a slab of the living rock, nearly on the level of the water, which had been fashioned into a sort of pier. She came out to the end to meet us.

"There she is," said Pete, to me but never taking his eyes from her.

-52

{{sc|There}} she was, in a dress of white and blue, with a bit of a band of blue at her collar. There she was with her hands bare and white and lovely; there she was with her glorious brown hair shining in the sun; there she was, the girl of the gauntlet who had talked with us on the sea and then drawn us up to the cloud ceiling where she had left us to meet the attack of her effigy while, lady-bug she, she had flown away home and had changed to this pretty dress of white and blue. There she was; and Pete, gazing at her, completely accused her.

I. I did not, completely. The sight of her now, and the memory of her in the minutes she had been with us on the sea, confused me; and then there was that wonder, in my mind, about the actual meaning of the effigy which I could not answer in the ready terms which satisfied Pete.

She started to speak, I thought, when we were several yards off; but she restrained her

-53

impulse and waited, looking at Pete, at me, and at Pete, until my float scraped on the rock. Then she said, "I'm glad you got here."

It was not, I felt certain, what first she had planned to say. No; something else had been in her mind. "I'm glad you got here," she repeated.

That was a welcome which gave men, in our situation, the choice, certainly, of interpreting it in two widely divergent ways.

Pete provided the reply.

"I'm glad to be here, and somewhat surprised," he said, stepping on the stone pier. "And I hardly feel you were expecting us," he cast at her coolly.

"Expecting you?" she repeated.

"Were you?"

She studied him and then me with serious, troubled eyes; she was not merely the pretty, puzzled girl who had captivated me on the sea.

I climbed from the cockpit, giving over charge of my plane to the men who had towed us.

A man in a trim, tan suit descended from the terrace to the pier. The girl turned and,

-54

seeing him, started with an impulse which she checked, as she had the one of the minute before. She stepped back from us a little, giving place to him.

He was as tall as Pete and heavier; in age, I placed him half-way between Pete's twenty-three years and my own twenty-eight. In energy and self-confidence I rated him beyond either of us, indeed beyond anyone I had ever seen.

The girl, I guessed, was used to encounters with him in which she had come off second best. There was contest between them. Whatever their relations, conquest of one over the other was not yet complete. This was the impression of that instant which excited and stirred me. Of course, liking her, I did not like him.

In any case, I think, he would have aroused antagonism in another man. I know now that he aimed at it.

He was good looking enough; I know some women held him handsome. He had sandy hair, exactly and aggressively brushed back; he had sandy, aggressive brows and a small,

-55

particularly assertive moustache. He was wide at the brow, equally wide at the jaw, narrow at the chin; he looked over Pete and then he looked over me with greyish, indolent eyes.

"Henry," she said to him in some sort of protest. He said nothing to her; he hardly looked at her but he reached for her hand and enclosed it in his own while he continued to favor us with his indolent scrutiny.

It was largely assumed, I realized; it was a pose which he perfected. He not only was assertive but he possessed a natural alertness and aliveness which would make the air service pick the man, at sight, for a pilot. You could count upon the accuracy and steadiness of his hand under all conditions. Physically he was muscle and bone; and the correlation of his mind with his muscle must be excellent; his reaction time, infinitesimal.

Reaction time, you know, is the interval which elapses between the moment a man's brain receives an impression and the instant when his hand acts in obedience to the stimulus in the brain. It is essential, in flying, that this time be exceedingly brief.
{{nop}}

-56

I was sure that this man flew, not only because he was so eminently fit for it, but because his bearing, besides being aggressive, was proprietory. He owned this place and those airplanes; he wanted to be, also, proprietor of the girl.

For all his self-assertion, for all his pose of indolence, he was under a slight tension. He had just finished a long flight, I suspected. The tension was of that sort. Moreover, I noticed now that his linen was crumpled though his coat was faultless. He had cast off a leather jacket, I guessed, and hurriedly donned this to drive from the other side of the lake to meet us.

He must have been flying one of the blue monoplanes upon the opposite beach; and he, having had a part in the events of this morning, never would have played a petty rôle. He had not been the pilot who merely had risen to put another aboard the effigy plane; nor had he been the pilot transferred from plane to plane to land the vehicle of the automaton. He had been the man, I believed, who had

-57

waited for us above the cloud ceiling and, with his slave plane, tried to send us down.

I believed him, therefore, to be the man who had killed Selby and Kent.

"You had a little trouble?" he inquired casually of me.

"A little," I told him.

"What?" He was making it, I realized, a test of me.

"We ran short of fuel," I answered.

"Nothing else wrong?"

"No."

"Come up to my house," he invited us, with a special possessiveness in the 'my.' "Bane's my name. You must be Carrick."

I nodded.

"You're Logan," he said to Pete, who made no reply to him.

By name he had known us, then, when he had tried to send us after Selby and Kent. By name, undoubtedly, he had known them. It had been no anonymous business upon which he had been engaged in the sky; he personally had picked his people.

Pete, ignoring Bane, spoke to the girl.
{{nop}}

-58

"You didn't mention your name when we were discussing how you lost your glove."

"Oh, I'm Helen Lacey."

I liked the sound of that. She was not Bane's wife; she was not wholly Bane's yet.

I saw Pete lift his head a little. He liked the sound of it, too, whatever might be his opinion of Helen Lacey. Her eyes rested solicitously upon Pete. Bane saw it and did not like that.

"You must be still soaked through," she said.

"Oh, no," said Pete. "I'm dryer. I've had quite a ride in the wind."

"I'll send you other clothes," offered Bane brusquely and interrupted words between them by beckoning down and introducing a short, wiry, black-haired, black-moustached youth whom he called Boggs and a pallid pilot of twenty-five designated as Donley.

They had accompanied Bane, I thought, from the other side of the lake; and I picked Donley as the probable pilot of the third monoplane and Boggs as the man who had

-59

made the transfer in the air to land the effigy's machine.

Bane was leading Helen Lacey and Pete along the pier and trying to stop them from speaking; he did not quite succeed at that but he did prevent them from words alone.

"I wish you'd tell me," I heard her beg Pete; and he laughed at her, somewhat as he had laughed on the sea.

"I don't know; I don't!" she protested to him; and Bane stopped all that by appropriating her hand again and drawing her to the other side of himself, away from Pete.

My companions, or escorts if you prefer, offered conversation with me solely on such casual topics as the weather, types of motors and wings. They were singularly devoid of any such concern as troubled Helen Lacey.

So we came up to the terrace where two more men and four women—girls, they were; everyone about the place was young—gazed at us. A couple of them spoke to Bane and Boggs but neither offered further introductions. We went on to the house and into a large, wide lounge gaily and coolly decorated

-60

in blues and yellows and where were pretty, painted chairs and little tables for cards and tea.

By all appearances, we were being welcomed at a summer country dwelling of a gentleman of taste and leisure and, if the pictures and bronzes were of his own selection, a dilettante in art.

A broad, stone stairway led upward; and we all proceeded toward it, playing the outward rôles of guests and hosts—all but the girl, Helen Lacey.

She suddenly freed her hand from Bane's appropriation and spun about to me.

"What happened after I left you?" she begged of me.

Bane also had swung about; and Boggs and Donley, suggestive less of hosts, at this moment, than of bailiffs, drew a little closer to me. She was pale and she bit her lips between her white teeth to stop their trembling as she faced me.

Bane, after his swift swing about, was become so indolent that he half closed his eyes while he watched me.
{{nop}}

-61

"Tell her all about it, Carrick," he invited me. "She knows we must have met; she knows that is how you found the way here. Tell her exactly how I treated you."

"Nothing happened after you left us," I replied to her. "Nothing at all; except we did meet Bane and followed him."

"I don't know about it. I tell you I don't know what it is," she said seriously as a girl could speak; and again had to hold her lips from trembling. "Do you believe me?"

"Yes," I said; and, looking at her, I did.

"Will you go up?" Bane invited Pete in a tone which made it a challenge. Pete accepted it and I went with him beside Bane while Boggs and Donley trailed along. Helen Lacey remained downstairs.

They led us to a bed-chamber on the east upon the second floor, a large luxurious room overlooking the lake.

"I'll send someone to you," said Bane and with Boggs and Donley, he went away.

-62

{{sc|I closed}} the door upon Pete and myself.

"Well," I started, "he practically admits it."

"Why not?" asked Pete. "We know about it; they all know; they're all in it."

"She's not," I said; and Pete laughed at me, who thereupon added; "She told me she didn't know about it."

"I heard her," said Pete; and I knew there was no use of argument with him. He argued, instead, with me. "Who sat as model for the dummy?" he demanded of me. "Isn't it she?"

"It's she," I admitted. "But I don't know yet what it means."

"What what means?"

"The effigy."

Once more Pete laughed at me. "Pretty place," he turned the subject, picking up a cigarette from a tray on a table. We went to the window together and witnessed our biplane being drawn up on the beach, across the lake, beside the three blue monoplanes.
{{nop}}

-63

For a second, as I let myself appreciate our situation, I wondered whether I had interpreted correctly the kick of Pete's legs when he lay on the wing.

"You wanted to come down?" I asked.

"I did."

"Well, here we are."

"At headquarters, I guess," said Pete. "At headquarters—headquarters of what? What's Bane's idea in killing Selby and Kent—and trying to get us?"

"What's his idea in doing it with her effigy?" I put to Pete.

"What difference does that make, how he does it?"

"The idea of the effigy is the bottom of it." I said, as positively as ever Pete had spoken. "When we get that, we'll get it all."

"There they are," said Pete and nodded at the terrace, where Helen Lacey, in her white and blue, appeared beside Bane. They were talking and our window was open but we could not catch their voices; but from their posture, and from protests of her hands, I knew they argued.
{{nop}}

-64

"They don't quite agree for the moment," observed Pete.

"They don't agree at all," I declared, excessively.

"No? Then why's she here? It's his house. Why'd she sit for the dummy?"

Someone knocked at our door—a subdued, respectful rap. We waited a moment; then Pete called, "Come in."

It was a valet with clothes for us.

They were lounging suits for a warm, June noonday; the valet laid them out and deferentially offered to help us change.

"I'm to tell you, sirs," he informed us, "luncheon will be served on the terrace in an hour."

"Oh," said Pete. "We're expected for luncheon?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

"Who invited us?"

"Mr. Bane, sir."

"Who's Mr. Bane?"

"Why, sir, Mr. Bane is the master here."

"What is his business?" Pete put to the valet directly.
{{nop}}

-65

"Business, sir?" repeated the valet, slightly shocked. He was young, as was everyone we had seen; but he was an English servant, correctly trained in the tradition.

"Yes; what's his business?" Pete asked again.

"Mr. Bane, sir, has no business; he has investments, undoubtedly, sir; but he has no business. He is a gentleman."

"Oh," said Pete. "And how long has he been one?"

"Sir?"

Pete simplified somewhat. "How long have you been in his service?"

"Six months, sir."

"He had this place, then?"

"Yes, sir."

"How long before had he been here?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Mr. Bane has a family?"

"There is no family here, sir."

"Who are these other people?"

"What other people, sir?"

"Well, Boggs, for instance; and Donley."
{{nop}}

-66

"Mr. Boggs and Mr. Donley are both guests here, sir."

"Is Miss Lacey also a guest here?"

"Yes, sir; Miss Lacey and Mr. Lacey, sir."

"Who is he?"

"Her father, sir."

"Hm. They all fly?"

"Not Mr. Lacey, sir; but the other genilemen; and some of the ladies. Aeronautics, sir, are popular here."

"Apparently. How many guests altogether are here?"

"I believe you must have seen them all, sir, when you came up—except Mr. Lacey. May I assist you now, sir?"

"I'm used to dressing myself," said Pete. "So is Mr. Carrick. If we get in great difficulty struggling with the buttons, we may ring for you. Run along."

I returned to a window when the valet was gone and saw Bane, alone, approaching the house.

"He's made up his mind about us," I interpreted for Pete the complete positiveness of our host's step.
{{nop}}

-67

Pete was putting on the dry under-clothing supplied to him. "These never belonged to Bane," he commented. "Does he keep them on hand for guests dropping in?"

Another knock at our door; not timid at all. It was merely a warning rap, immediately followed by the opening of the door. Bane stepped in.

-68

{{sc|"You}} are curious about me," he observed.

"I am," admitted Pete, playing up to him. "Very."

"I puzzle you," Bane added, with greater self-satisfaction.

"I don't make you out at all," confessed Pete, readily.

Bane referred to me and I played Pete's effective string.

"You're absolutely new to me," I said.

Bane firmly closed the door behind him. "It is because you never met before a man completely sane."

"That's it?" inquired Pete, as though speculating on it.

"That's it. It may prove that it was worth while to give you a chance to see it."

Evidently this was an allusion to Selby and Kent who had not been endowed with our opportunity. I did not concede that ours had come completely as a gratuitous act on the

-69

part of Bane. Pete undoubtedly also disputed this; but he decided not to argue the point at present; and I did not. Pete continued to dress.

"You fly," said Bane to Pete, "well. Not particularly this morning; but you jumped fast after you were hit. Your record is good, especially in the fog and mist and by night without bearings. Yours," he approved me, "Is fairly good under those conditions. I can use a couple of pilots who are navigators, too. The chief trouble in taking you on will be the element of time."

"Time?" inquired Pete. "You mean time to learn your particular type of flying?"

"No," said Bane. "You can pick that up. The trouble is the time it will take to cure you of the idiotic delusions of conduct and duty which have been bred into you. I know what they are; I had them once. If my father had not been killed, he might have brought me up in them and fastened them on me, too. My father was murdered when I was five."

"Five?" asked Pete, as Bane had emphasized it.
{{nop}}

-70

"Fortunately a particularly impressionable age, good for the first planting of the seeds of sanity. My father was murdered, I mentioned to you."

"Yes," said Pete, attentively.

"He was shot down, in cold blood. I happened to see it. My mother and I were with him; we were in an automobile. He did not raise his hands at the order of two young men who stopped the car; he had an idea of defending my mother from consequences other than robbery. So they shot him.

"Later, in connection with some other accident, the police picked them up. My mother identified them and they were brought to one of the farcical mummery shows called a trial by jury. I attended the trial. The prosecution considered it advisable; it would help to turn sympathy away from the prisoners to my mother and me. The plan, however, did not succeed. Sympathy for the prisoners prevailed; the public wept and prayed for them; the jury acquitted them positively amid cheers.

"It was a tremendous experience for me; for I had seen those men kill my father; and

-71

then I had seen everyone else in the courtroom cry for joy and cheer when they were freed.

"Still my mother, loyal woman, set herself to educate me to the ordinary, idiotic delusions regarding conduct. You follow me?"

"Perfectly," said Pete, who was dressed now. He sat on the edge of a bed.

I nodded when Bane referred to me.

He remained standing near the door; his hands, I saw, clenched; he quivered. The thing which he told us was overwhelming to him.

"My mother and I were what people call 'left alone' in the world. She took a position to support herself and me. Naturally there grew between us ties of the sort which people call exceptionally close.

"She was a beautiful, gentle woman. One evening, when she was on the street alone, a man seized her; she was saved by a passerby and the man caught.

"He had an outrageous record—a record people pretend to consider outrageous. He had committed habitually the most shocking

-72

crimes. Of course, people do not actually condemn what they call crimes—except when the crimes endanger themselves. They admire the man they call criminal. They admired this man and proved it. They knew what he had been doing; and he was free.

"To be sure, the police put up a pretense at not knowing where he was; that was a part of the buffoonery. Now that he was handed over to the law, it had to take its course; and in this case, not even a jury could free him. He was senienced to life imprisonment.

"Of course, being what is called a criminal, he had far more political influence than a lawabiding fool. He was a member of an organization useful to a prominent and powerful politician who had, in his debt, the governor of the state. So the prisoner remained in the penitentiary only long enough to drop, for a while, from public notice; then the governor pardoned him, secretly.

"Immediately he sought my mother again; and killed her. I found her.

"You will excuse so much personal feelings; but I am attempting, Logan and Carrick, to

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lead you with as little loss of time as possible into the state of sanity which I have attained. I appreciate the difficulties under which you labor; for even yet, after my mother was killed, I clung to some of the rags of the delusions about conduct to which people pretend.

"The re-election of that governor cured me. For, in face of the facts published before all the people, they re-elected him by a tremendous and triumphant majority.

"That night, I stood in the street, seeing figures of his popular vote flashed on the screen from a newspaper office and hearing the people cheer and cheer, as they had cheered when the murderers of my father were acquitted. I remember feeling that at last all rubbish about abiding by the law was cleared from my brain; I turned against those cheering people about me; I struck at them and tried to stop them. Having only my hands, then, they overcame me; and I let them think I was quieted. Crazy, someone called me. The fact was, on that night I became completely sane."

Bane lified his head with the sinews in his

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throat astrain; his strong shoulders stiffened. I glanced, once, at his hands and saw them clenched white at his side.

"I have something more than my fists now," he continued. "I can strike them as and when I please; and they can do nothing whatever about it."

He shook, for a few seconds, like a man with a chill; suddenly he relaxed, smiled mirthlessly and looked calmly at us.

"Toss me a cigarette," he requested Pete, who picked one from a stand and handed it over. Pete struck a match, lit Bane's cigarette and one for himself. I, being a third, struck my own match.

"The airplane makes it so easy to do to them whatever one wants," Bane continued, in a voice calm from contempt. "So easy to have one's way with them.

"Here they are by millions all about me," he gestured in a circle beyond the hills, "millions of people busy heaping up accumulations of wealth and property, dearer to them than life itself, and which they can not possibly

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defend from me. Nor can they defend themselves, if I choose to kill them.

"It is amusing—is it not?—how society organizes and over-organizes and superorganizes itself to make an instrument which puts the whole organization absolutely at the mercy of a man like me.

"When they developed the automobile, they almost destroyed themselves; for they put it in the power of a few men, with nerve and imagination, to strike in sudden bold raids and rob and kill them at pleasure and to laugh at pursuit.

"With the greatest difficulty, society doubled and quadrupled its police force and hired and trained highway officers and special guards in their cities in an attempt to make society safe from the few—only very few men, indeed—operating against it in automobiles; but society, as an organized structure, began to stagger. Then it went on and provided the airplane, putting a hundred times, a thousand times the power in the hands of—me.

"The childish organization of cheering sheep—which composes organized society and which

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found such difficulty in defending itself from the popping pistols of men scurrying through the streets in automobiles—can not possibly defend itself against men armed with ton bombs of TNT and flying in the sky.

"Society, as we know it, doomed itself when it invented the airplane—and made a man like me. Society can not possibly survive the airplane—and me.

"I am about to alter the order of things, gentlemen; I am about to take over power and authority in a new way. I am going to show the world something new in domination.

"Of course, I need a few assistants; not many, but a few. I may offer you the opportunity to assist me."

He held his cigarette stub and studied it, critically, not looking at either of us. Suddenly he snapped it away, glanced quickly at Pete and me, turned and left us.

Pete and I stared at each other, in more deadly seriousness than ever before in our lives.

"Ton bombs of TNT he mentioned," Pete

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said tome. "Two thousand pound bombs of TNT. D'you suppose he has 'em?"

I thought of Bane's airplanes and his workshop across the lake and the indefinite possibility of secret manufactury or of storage in the valleys of these wooded hills.

"Why not?" I replied to Pete.

"There is no why not to him," Pete solemnly admitted to me. "He might have them; I was only thinking, if he has!"

—78

-79

—80

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{{sc|The}} same image, I knew, was in Pete's thought as in mine; it was of a test we had witnessed of one of the new navy bombs of TNT which blew apart and sent down, in one terrific detonation, a great armored battleship.

"Suppose," said Pete, thinking again out loud, "he drops one of those things in a street—a New York street. Remember when somebody dropped from a cart a bomb—it had half a pound of dynamite, perhaps—in Wall Street?"

I nodded.

"Ten bombs," iterated Pete, "from airplanes piloted by him—completely sane. The idea of the dummy," Pete continued, recollecting the mechanical pilot, "becomes clearer. He'll install it on a weight-carrying plane, load it with TNT and send it where he wants. Evidently he was simply practicing control of

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the thing with Selby and Kent—and you and me."

I thought, not of the mechanism of the thing, but of the effigy—the likeness of the girl, Helen Lacey. What did it mean that he so used her effigy? What was she in this affair?

Voices floated to us through the open windows; the clink of glass and china and silver told me that the table was laid. I heard Bane's voice, not hers; but Bane's tone told me that she was there; and I went to the window and saw her.

A servant knocked and entered. "Luncheon will be served at once, sirs," he announced.
{{dhr}}
"Put on this other suit," Pete urged me, when the man was gone. "We might as well both be presentable. I don't need to be the seventh son of a seventh son to hint to you that neither of us are likely to leave this place except by special permission. Hurry up. Let's not keep luncheon waiting. I'll say one thing for our host," Pete was looking out of the window. "He's not superstitious. He's having thirteen at his table."
{{nop}}

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There were six men and five girls making, with ourselves, thirteen when we came down to the terrace. Except for one man, older than the rest, they were the same people whom we had seen on our way into the house. The valet, evidently, had told us the truth; we had seen the company of the place except Helen Lacey's father.

Bane, himself managing the introductions, presented us, properly, first to the four girls who had eyed us on our way to the house. "Mrs. Donley," he called a fuzzy, over-rouged blonde with baby-blue eyes. "Miss Gessler," was a languid, green-eyed girl with long, slender limbs and thin, sensuous lips. She had a habit of smoothing her silk dress, drawing it closer to her figure. Boggs evidently was her especial admirer.

The third girl by name also was a maiden, "Miss Cleet." I never saw her again after this luncheon and there was nothing about her definitely to be remembered, except that she was feminine and young and apparently delighted a brick-red haired youth whom I was

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to meet, in a moment. The fourth girl was married; Mrs. Mendell.

Her husband, Mendell, was a stolid appearing person to be a pilot; he had a strong, heavy frame which seemed slow; but he surprised me by speaking quickly and by the flash in his small, scheming eyes when we looked each other over. The brick-red haired youth, who was as tall as Pete or Donley, went by the name of Kinvarra, of which he was proud; for he spelled it, to me after Bane pronounced it.

These two patently teamed in a sort of foursome with Boggs and Donley; and I recognized in them the nucleus of Bane's accepted corps of assistants. They were a heterogeneous quartet but they displayed one strong characteristic in common; each man meant to get for himself what he was after.

Not that I received the impression of discord between them. Quite to the contrary, all was amity; for of course they needed to work together and they all realized it.

In fact, they evidently appreciated the advantage of further re-inforcement; so they

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looked over Pete and me, considering our qualities as prospective partners in the business which engaged them.

None of them was of the class of Bane; none of them harbored his almost evangelical intensity. I did not have to wonder what tremendous personal experience had turned them to his enterprize; the prospect of easy prey and loot was sufficient to explain them. They were practical souls of the sort readily swept together at the promise of wealth and power to be gained at no greater price than the risk of their necks.

None of them was capable of conceiving and designing the great plan which possessed Bane; mentally, cracked as he was, he was their leader. None of them contested that. They were banded together behind him—each for his own advantage.

Their women—the two wives and the two sweethearts—stood together in a somewhat more suspicious alliance. They did not comprehend as clearly as the men, I thought, the project on hand; but they knew it to be barbaric and magnificent and it fascinated them.
{{nop}}

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A little apart, and contrasting with them in bearing and mood, was a grey and brooding man of fifty.

"Mr. Lacey," Bane called him, with a queer mixture of respect and suspicion. Mr. Lacey was slight of build, like his daughter, and endowed with the dignity which, even in his brooding mood of depression, declared him a man of good birth and breeding. Obviously, he was out of place among these other companions of Bane; he shared nothing with them—least of all their expectant excitement. He knew the purpose of these airplanes and pilots with their tons of TNT and the knowledge overwhelmed him. He examined Pete and me with dull, absent-minded eyes.

He seemed, for a moment, familiar to me. Somewhere, under very different conditions, I had seen him; or perhaps it was his picture in a newspaper. His name, Lacey, as Bane repeated it, struck me more familiarly, too; it ought to carry some connotation. What? I wondered and tried to recall, as I shook hands with him.

His daughter hovered at his elbow, and he

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gazed at her with the same absent-minded, haunting stare which she answered with a smile of her lips; not of her eyes.

A servant circulated a tray of cocktails to which the girls helped themselves. The pilots, each in his turn, referred to Bane who shook his head and none of them touched a glass. Nor did Pete nor I. If they preferred clear wits for the afternoon, so did we.

"Come to the table," Bane commanded and everybody obeyed.

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{{sc|It}} was a long, narrow table set on the mountain edge of the terrace and half shaded, already, by the trees at the foot of the slope. Six chairs backed the lake and seven faced it. Bane pre-empted the central one of these and established Helen Lacey at his right; he sat her father at his left with Boggs beyond.

Pete, he placed directly opposite himself; and me two places away from Pete. The languid, green-eyed Gessler girl lounged between us.

"You must have jumped cleverly," she promptly opened the table conversation, complimenting Pete and surprising him.

"Jumped?" he asked; and she made her comment definite.

"With the parachute."

"Oh," said Pete. "Well, I got off."

"You're the first who did," she continued in the same flattering, deliberately drawling

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tone; and now she lowered her dark eyelids provokingly.

This provokement was not pointed at Pete; nor at me; nor at Boggs, whom I had identified as her especial adorer. He was this; but I realized, during the next few seconds, that she was utterly indifferent to his admiration. Bane, she played for; Bane, she sought to provoke; and at this, she instantly succeeded.

"You're served, Sally," he spoke to her in a warning, steel-like tone. He was so angry, I perceived, that he could devise no better interjection than to call attention to the cup placed before her.

Sally slowly and languorously opened her eyes to more than their natural wideness and gazed at him.

"I don't care for cold consomme," she cast at him; and Pete re-inforced her in her defiance.

"Fave there been many more?" he asked her.

"More?" For the moment, she had to think about Bane; she'd forgotten what she had just started, until Pete reminded her.
{{nop}}

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"More who tried to jump," he said.

"Well, you know about two, don't you?"

"Yes," said Pete. "I know about two. Were there others before Monday?"

"Not at sea," Sally said. "But—but—" she deliberated, meeting with level, half lifted lids Bane's glare at her and drawing the silk of her dress close about her figure. "Last week," she finished, turning casually to Pete, "surely you heard that a couple of pilots were Jost in the mountains."

"Not navy men," said Pete.

"No," agreed Sally. "One was army—the other a mail flyer."

At this, Bane cut in furiously. "That's a d—d lie," he denied.

"That an army pilot and a mail flyer were lost?" questioned Sally, turning to him. "Oh, I see what you mean; you didn't know he was a mail flyer until afterwards."

"Drop it," threatened Bane directly; and Sally looked down, breathing short, and decided to drop it.

Not from fear of him, I thought, but because she had thrust the affair temporarily as

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far as she wished; she had accomplished her present purpose. What? What had she been after in this planned provocation of him?

I glanced about the table where everyone now was served with chilled consomme but few were eating. I returned to Helen Lacey who sat with her brown hair bronze-gold in a shaft of the sun and with her grey eyes aghast before Sally Gessler, before Pete and me. Before Bane; for now she confronted him.

"The army pilot—and the mail flyer," she began.

"Fell!" declared Bane. "Fell; fell," he insisted; whereat Sally laughed and Helen Lacey looked at her, at Pete and me; she looked past Bane at her father; and she relapsed in her chair.

Pete, I saw, straightened a little; and I pulled up with warmer blood beating in me, too, as I became sure of the reason for this bold baiting of Bane. It was because the brown-haired girl beside him had not known of the actual adventures of her effigy which masked the pilot mechanism of that murderous monoplane; not only had she played no

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deliberate part in the scheme but she had not even known that she, in effigy, had sent down Selby and Kent and, a couple of hours ago, had attacked Pete and me. She had begun to guess it only after speaking to us on the sea.

Now she more than guessed; and more than guessed about the army pilot and the lost mail flyer, too. Undoubtedly other puzzling matters, bewildering bits which previously she had innocently explained but which fitted in no proper pattern in her mind, suddenly fell into place, too. I could see, as she shrank back and looked about the table and at Bane—again and again at Bane and shrank from him—that all this company and especially he assumed a new and frightful aspect to her.

He saw it; all the rest, and her father bowed in his seat, saw it too. Sally Gessler, slouching in the chair between Pete and me, witnessed it; and smiled at her success. Yes; so far, she had succeeded; and it was as far as she desired, just now.

The servants cleared away the chilled consomme and laid before us capon and greens from which, as from the iced bouillon, the

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brown head, in the shaft of the sun, shrank. The dark, indolent head between Pete and me inclined lazily as Sally Gessler cut the white slices of fowl with satisfied and triumphant knife and ate with slow, studied voluptuousness of her thin lips. Lazily she lifted her dark {{hinc|eye-lids}} and gazed across the table.

Pete and I proceeded to eat. I felt, actually, something like appetite started by this quarrel at the table. I realized, by contrast, that previously I had not believed there was any way out, for Pete and me, from the grip of this man, so "completely sane", who killed pilots for practice or his amusement and who armed himself with automatic airplanes and ton bombs of TNT. But this quarrel at the table seemed, slightly at least, to loosen his grip on me.

The girl across the table shrank under exactly the opposite sensation. She felt his grip suddenly fasten upon her. She had not appreciated, until now, his nature and the quality of his company and the character of his house. How was it that she was here?

I glanced again at her father. He had

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known. He was not of this company in its soul and purpose; but he had known. Sally Gessler had imparted nothing which surprised him. I recognized, now, that he, because he had known, had been a sort of prisoner here. His daughter, since she had learned, would be a prisoner hereafter, like Pete and me.

A servant—he was the valet who had attended us—came from the house and bent at Bane's ear, delivering a message.

Bane arose, and in the general direction of Donley, said, "Cawder."

"Hm," said Donley. "It's time."

"Back in a moment," said Bane, not to Donley, but to the rest of us. It was a sort of warning which said, in effect, "Stay as you are until I return."

"Who's Cawder?" calmly inquired Pete of Donley, when Bane disappeared.

"Oh; he's at headquarters."

"Headquarters?" said Pete and, for once betrayed surprise. "Isn't this headquarters?"

Donley laughed; Boggs laughed; Mendell and Kinvarra and Sally Gessler, too. They laughed not only at Pete, for his surprise, but

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at me for mine, which was as evident, and at the girl beside Bane's empty chair.

The sensation of a little loosening of the grip on me, was gone. Something tighter and more terrible pressed me in its place—something not to be slipped off by means of a mere quarrel between Sally Gessler and Bane.

Across the table in the sun, the brown head bent toward me. "I want a minute with you," said Helen Lacey suddenly to me.

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{{sc|Of}} course, I wanted a minute, and much more than that, with her; but how were we to have it?

She had not assimilated, I thought, her realization of her situation. She left the table, as though she were free to walk off and I free to accompany her. I arose and followed. No one hindered; and I caught step with her at the end of the terrace where she led me upon a path under the trees.

Still no one interfered. The company of the table sided, I realized, with Sally Gessler rather than with Bane in regard to the brown head beside me. They would welcome a break between Bane and the girl to whom he had insisted that the army flier and the mail pilot merely had "fallen". None of them, who watched us from the table, cared to assume the personal responsibility of her further information; but none interposed between her and me.
{{nop}}

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She walked a little ahead of me on the narrow path with her head bent down; but she saw nothing on the ground, for she stumbled over a root. I snatched forward and caught her and held her trembling in my hands.

"He killed them; he killed them; he's been killing them!" she cried to me, as I turned her toward me.

"Yes," I said.

"All four?"

I knew whom she meant—our two pilots and the army man and the mail flyer.

"I haven't a doubt of it," I told her.

She twisted, tensely; not with any effort to escape me; it was a convulsive shudder which my hands helped her to control.

"This morning, just before I talked to you, he tried to kill you."

"Not me; Logan," I corrected her. "He'd just smashed Logan down."

"I see that's what you meant; that's what you were talking about."

"Yes."

"How did he do it? How?"

I saw in her grey eyes and I felt in her,

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under my hands, that she knew now; she knew; but she had to have me tell her, too.

"The automatic airplane," I said. "Surely you've seen it."

"Seen it? Of course, I have. He was perfecting it to give to the government, he told me." She repeated, hollowly, "he told me. He put me in the seat; he runs it under a figure of me."

"Yes," I said.

"You've seen it, then? I mean, the figure of me."

"I've seen the figure of you. Logan, you understand, at first thought it was you who smashed him down."

The grey eyes gazed into mine but no longer followed my thought; "He made it," she said to me. "He made it of me, himself, of wax and wood. He's a sort of an artist, you see." And my hands became helpless to quiet her quivering.

"He's been using it—me—to kill four men."

I only held her firmly.

"Why? What's he doing? What's he—planning?" She gasped at me; and I saw,

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with her word, that fear of far more than the terror already told, had come to her. "Why has he killed them? Why?"

"He told us this morning," I said. "He told Logan and me part of his plan and the reason he does these things. I don't know whether it's true, whether it's the real reason. But this is what he said. When he was a child, his father was murdered and the murderers were tried and freed—with cheers. His mother brought him up; he was devoted to her, adored her. She was killed by a man, who already had done murder and had been sentenced to imprisonment for life but was freed by a governor to do a politician a political favor. After the murder of his mother by this man, the governor who pardoned him was re-elected by a big majority. Bane said he stood with them when they were cheering the re-election on the street. It made him 'completely sane', he said; mad, of course, he means. What he told me would explain him, if it's true. I don't know anything at all as to whether it's true."

"I do!"

"What?"
{{nop}}

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"It's true. Oh, it's true; it's true!"

She wrenched from me, fought off my hands again and stared past me down at the terrace and the table which Bane and she and I had deserted. Another place was empty; four altogether, I counted. The fourth was her father's.

"Father," she said, strangely whispering. "Where's he gone?"

"I don't know."

"Father," she repeated and again said, "father," before she succeeded in telling me, "father was that politician."

"What politician?"

"For whom the governor did the favor."

"What?"

"That's it, I tell you. That man—that murderer—once delivered votes for father; so the governor freed him. He killed again; and father supported the governor for re-election, too."

We stood silent, side by side, in the little wood. Silence with its trivial sounds, is what I remember for that moment when my mind tried to take in, all at once, what she had told

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me, and, unable to, left me listening to the cheep of birds and the echo of an airplane motor from across the lake. Whose? I wondered with total inconsequence.

What drummed in my brain was that this light, lovely girl was trapped in this business of Bane with which she, herself, had had no direct concern, until through her father it enmeshed and ensnared her far more hopelessly and helplessly than it held Pete and me. Her father's name ran familiarly to me; a politician, as she had said, in power in his party.

"Father heard of him at the time," she said to me. "It was in the papers, of course; for Harry had to be taken to a sanitarium on that election night. Father felt—terribly."

She stopped and struggled in the silence to think it out. "But he didn't feel to blame. I didn't feel him—to blame. Pardons are part of politics; they have to be; they're necessary; they're right—some of them anyway." Desperately she labored against her own honesty to be loyal to her father in his defense. "It seemed only a sort of frightful accident that happened to Harry Bane. We did every-

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thing we could for him. I used to go to the sanitarium to try to help him."

"Oh," I said. "That's where it began between him and you."

"That's where it began. He liked me; he begged me again and again to come. He seemed to depend on me; so I came very often. It seemed to help him. It seemed even to cure him."

"He was cured, you thought?"

"Yes; he was cured—we thought. The sanitarium people said so. They dismissed him. Then he wanted to marry me."

"Oh."

"When I couldn't, he thought it was because I didn't believe he was cured. He said he'd give me time and prove himself; he went away. I got letters and cards from him anywhere and everywhere for two years. Then this spring he came and called for father and me and brought us—here. He seemed sane. He said he had these people here perfecting a special sort of plane to give to the government. Hie'd made money, he said; and now was perfecting the airplane. . . Only a couple of

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days ago, things seemed queer. He'd taught me to fly; and this morning I followed him; I lost him; then I talked with you on the sea."

I longed for her in my arms again; I longed to try to quiet and comfort her; but the tumult of the trembling of that slight, lovely body was beyond me. She turned to me and cried, "What have we done?"

"You've done nothing wrong. Your father—I can't say."

"You know better than I. Harry's talked to you. He's been killing people in practice for what?"

"He has tremendous plans."

"With his airplanes, of course."

"Airplanes," I said. "And ton bombs of TNT."

She winced away from me; and her eyes, roving over the house and the lake, sought again the table on the terrace where the same four places remained empty.

"Where's father?" she repeated to me. "This morning, he must have found out something. When I was away. He couldn't tell it to me."
{{nop}}

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"There's Bane," I said. He was coming from the house and of the house, rather than of him, she spoke.

"It's not headquarters," she reminded me. "You heard them laugh."

I nodded.

"What we've seen is only a part—part," she repeated, "of something frightful they're preparing to do—for which we're to blame, father and me."

"Not you," I denied.

Bane halted at the table only for a word with Boggs who pointed to our path. I know now that we had no chance whatever of escape; probably I realized it then. But the idea of seeking safety for herself never entered the brown head beside me. She advanced to meet Bane who approached as overbearing as before and angry, too. For we had disobeyed him; she had learned, and I had told her, what he had forbidden her to hear.

I could see, as he came up, that he was choosing and discarding and choosing again what to say to us. Then the clatter on the lake gave him a satisfactory cue.
{{nop}}

-105

The airplane, tested a couple of minutes ago, moved over the water toward us; and we both glanced at it.

"Headquarters," Bane informed us, "headquarters has just sent for you."

-106

{{sc|This}} news, and his manner, confirmed me in the idea which I had formed. It was that the business before us was immediate; Pete and I had stumbled upon no mere plan and project but upon an enterprize nearly prepared. Bane lacked, or at least he could employ, a couple more pilots; he might make use of Pete and me; but not if it required time to turn us to his purposes.

Time, obviously, pressed him; it was a rebellious element which he could not control. He wanted to take time, now, to indulge himself in personal punishment of us; but time defied him. There was a touch, too, of authority from headquarters, whoever and wherever they were. So he contented himself with escorting us to the terrace.

The men had left the luncheon table; they were in the house where, as I soon was given to understand, Pete must remain.

"Logan does not go with us; nor your

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father," Bane informed Helen and me. "You can speak to him; he's in his room," Bane told her. "Take what you want for the trip."

"How long?"

"A day."

She asked nothing more but turned from him and went into the house, he watching her; and I watched how he hungered for her, how his eyes caressed her hair, the curve of her cheek, the white of her neck and followed the line of her figure to her pretty legs and her little feet. So I recognized, with a rush of relief, how selective was his insanity and how it guarded her.

Brutally, with no regard for them at all, he had slain Selby, Kent, the army pilot and the mail flyer; how many more, I could not know. With complete callousness he planned, with his airplanes and ton bombs of TNT, the most frightful and pitiless catastrophe because the ganglion of preventive mercy was milked dry in his mind; but other ganglia, filled by his mother with chivalry and respect of another sort, held full.

He hungered for this girl but he hungered

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as much for her soul and mind as for her body. He held her, physically, in his power; but by physical force, he would take no advantage. He must win her, by wooing, after his own way. That was what I saw.

Sally Gessler saw it, too. Her, he could have for the asking; and he would not trouble to ask. Her eyes never left him but he, when Helen disappeared, ignored Sally. He said to me:

"You're ready." It was a statement, informing me that I was to travel as I was.

"Yes," I accepted it.

"I'll show you before this time tomorrow who is sane. Go down to the bus."

The seaplane, which had crossed the lake, was at the stone pier. It was a large, cabin monoplane of the passenger-carrying type with nothing particular to distinguish it. A crew of two were aboard, strangers to me; and Bane did not bother to make them known to me when he and Helen entered the cabin. He said to the pilot, "How are you, Sander?" and to the mechanic, "G'day, Larkin." Each man touched his cap. They were good servants

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of the beefy, reliable type of the two who had towed us. Sander would never mistake a radio compass correction or miscalculate a landing level; an excellent pilot for a daylight passenger bus. But for finding the way about in fog and by night without bearings, in a one-place, five-mile-a-minute monoplane, give me Boggs or Donley—or myself or Pete.

Bane held to the same preference, I knew. He could supply himself with any number of pilots like Sander for passenger planes or freighters; but of the combat type, he had had only four to sit at his table until Pete and I followed him home; and we were not yet converted to him.

The object of taking me to headquarters—wherever they were—obviously was to convert me and, through me, convince Pete and make us trustworthy combat pilots in the imminent enterprise with the automaton planes and the ton bombs of TNT. Pete, I realized, was held as a sort of hostage for my good faith and behavior upon this educational expedition. Lacey, I supposed, was similarly held hostage for his daughter.
{{nop}}

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Quietly she took the seat to the right in the front of the cabin behind Sander's compartment. Bane placed her travelling bag in a rack and pre-empted the chair to the left. I sat behind her. Larkin closed the cabin and posted himself aft. Only the five of us were aboard. We rose and pointed westward, Larkin manipulating a device which pulled up the pontoons and lowered wheels for field landing.

The disc of a radio ear-phone dotted the cabin wall beside Bane; now and then he bent to it. We flew steadily, not fast, at a hundred and fifty miles the hour, approximately, and up eight thousand feet which Sander dropped to six when we were clear of the hills. Westward, always.

As flight, it was mere transportation, wholly common-place; but never before had a flight so excited me.

Frequently, when I had flown past cities, especially when bound on bombing tests at sea, I had imagined, theoretically, what must happen if something snapped in my brain or in another pilot's head, and a modern, postwar bomb detonated in Broadway or Wall

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Street. The thought of the catastrophe used to hold me, for seconds, fascinated by the cataclysm I could cause. It is a satisfaction of the sense of power—isn't it?—which impels every child to destruction. The same sense of power, from my potential destructiveness, pleased me at those moments, with nothing at all abnormal in my brain.

Bane, looking down, made himself in his mind the demi-god which I had imagined myself momentarily at thought of my titanic power of destructiveness. In his mind, this did not end with the moment; it met nothing to forbid it, no restraint. In his mind, the barrier between the inborn impulse to prove superiority by smashing, the barrier built by example, by precept and training, was swept away. I saw him smile, as he looked down; and I knew he lived in the pomp and glory of his contemplation of a civilization utterly at his mercy.

How dangerous a habit today for civilization to drive men mad! It was safe enough for society when all that the man, made mad, could do was to seize a stone and hurl it; still

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safe enough when society, besides making him mad, supplied him a spear and then a gun; still safe enough when it added to his equipment also a motor-car; but now he seized airplanes, some of them automatic, and ton bombs of TNT.

I saw him smile, looking down, and I went sick at the image of him over a city and smiling as his hands released ton bombs of TNT; and I knew he could do it. Nothing in his mind would stop the message to his hands; the great bombs would drop and detonate.

Nothing in his mind would stop him; but something elsewhere? Suddenly I went warmer as I saw him lift his head and look about to her and cease to smile; for he met, in her eyes, terror. What did he expect, I wondered; what did he want and demand there?

Approval of himself, of course; he craved her approval.

So, society, after driving him mad and supplying him with airplanes and tons of TNT, perhaps still set some check on him; he wanted approval.
{{nop}}

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Not approval of any person, of any girl. Sally Gessler's approval, for instance, was less than nothing to him. He required the approval of the lovely, level, honest grey eyes which had come to comfort him, when he had been confined in the sanitarium, and which now stared at him in terror.

I thought how, on the terrace, he had denied to her what already he had done, trifling as those killings were in comparison to his plans. I thought how he had cried to her "they fell; fell; fell," of the army pilot and the mail flyer whom he had murdered. He had not told her, for he dared not.

Suddenly the reason for the effigy declared itself to me. Casting himself into crime, he would carry her with him but he could not carry herself; so he had, of himself, fashioned her effigy of wax and wood and seated it in the airplane which he dispatched on his murders. I thought of savages, who fashion clay figures of animals over which they wish to gain power, imagining that by enslaving the figure they may later control the creature itself; so he had enslaved her effigy. Unable

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yet to bend her to his purpose, his mad mind had found satisfaction in sending her effigy on errands pleasing to him, frightful to her.

Partly it was in practice of control of the mechanism that he had killed Selby and Kent and the other two; partly also, now I was sure, the murders had been some savage rite in which he imagined he was gaining power over her by enslaving, to his purpose, her effigy.

Some of this, she seemed to discern; for as she stared at him, her manner changed; she choked down her terror and repulsion. A flicker of fiery blood flamed in her cheek. She, if anyone, held power to control him.

When he spoke to her, she replied so as to please him.

"Perhaps, perhaps," tapped the tiny pulse in her temple, "I can yet do something with him."

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{{sc|Westward}}; westward we flew, while I sat behind her, watching her and wondering at her as she soothed and entertained him.

She knew it was no hour for argument. He wished to submerge, for the present, the conflict between them; so she humored him, taking up and making as much as possible of the trifles he offered for conversation; and she delighted him.

Almost as completely ignored as Larkin in the rear of the cabin, I became a spectator. Suppressed was her terror of him; conquered, was her prostration at the luncheon table. She smiled and laughed and bantered; and, in my wonder at her, I realized that she had had training at this with him. She had met him, originally, through visits to him at a sanitarium.

Late in the afternoon, he recollected Larkin. "Tea," he ordered; and the man, whose talents proved to be many, opened an electrically

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equipped cupboard, prepared tea and toast, produced little cakes and served us upon a tiny table.

She sipped her tea and ate her toast and cake. Not with appetite, but she managed it. On we flew.

Chicago proved to be our destination. We passed and accompanied the customary passenger and freight planes as we approached the towers in twilight. For the sun of the long day was set. The crimson and yellow of the afterglow hung high in the dust halo over the city; but already air beacons gleamed and roofs were swept with the horizontal glare of landing lights.

Planes humming beside us, their position lanterns streaking across the sky. Likewise we were only a hum and a streak as we circled, finding a way for our descent. We signalled a definite roof; it flashed back, "All clear; come down"; and we were down on our wheels and stopped ten yards from the windward edge.

Groundmen materialized from a trap door to take charge of the machine; they lifted a

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section of roof, disclosing a runway down which the plane was slipped. The roof section settled back; the roof was ready for another landing.

Bane escorted us from the cabin to an elevator operated by a man who addressed him respectfully.

"Mr. Cawder in his office?" Bane asked him.

"Yes, sir. I just brought him myself from the street."

"Thirty," said Bane to the man, designating the floor; to us, he volunteered the information. "This is our building."

"Your building?" I repeated.

"Why not?" Bane asked me, smiling.

We were dropping floor after floor to reach the thirtieth; and the roof had given me some idea of the linear proportions of the building. It was a mammoth structure. Bane explained to me:

"We don't need it all for offices. We rent out several floors; but our main offices are here. We own the building."

"We?" I repeated. "Who do you mean by we?"
{{nop}}

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Bane smiled at me, as the elevator stopped and the three of us stepped into a lighted hall with long rows of office doors showing lighted transoms. "Cawder and Company, Investments. Entrance" read the lettering on the door directly before us.

"This is our name on this floor," Bane informed me and reminded me, "I told you I'd show you who's sane."

He opened the door, leading us into a waiting-room panelled, soft-carpeted, furnished with large leather chairs and a desk at which a demurely dressed but alert-looking girl sat in attendance.

She spoke to Bane who asked: "Mr. Cawder alone?"

"He has just heard you're here."

"I'll send for these people in a minute," Bane said to her and with no word to us, he opened a further door and disappeared, leaving us alone with the girl at the desk. Behind us, only the door through which we had entered and the hallway and the elevators of "their" building.

I could take his complete carelessness as a

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pose to impress us or not as carelessness at all but complete confidence. Hardly confidence in us but in the situation which enveloped us.

The girl at the desk gave absolutely no suggestion of guarding us or even watching us with particular concern. To be sure, a telephone transmitter was only a few inches from her lips and on the desk top were rows of ivory buttons suggestive of power to summon others instantly.

Probably I could not escape if I tried; and the thought of trying seemed not even to enter Helen Lacey's head. She ignored the attendant's invitation to be seated and stood gazing impatiently at the inner door through which, after a few minutes, another girl appeared and informed us;

"Mr. Cawder will see you."

We followed her through a large office, lighted but deserted, where several desks denoted the presence, at business hours, of a dozen men, probably, and as many more stenographers. Our reception at evening obviously did not mean that this office operated

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at night; the air of the place was of an office opened, after hours, for some special, personal work of an executive. We proceeded into a panelled passage and suddenly upon the right was a doorway or, at least, an aperture. A panel was swung inward, acting as a door except that it was without knob or keyhole or evidence of lock in the panel itself. The girl gestured us through this doorway and we entered a panelled room of good size, almost square.

It was peculiar in some important aspect but I had no mind to discern in what. Bane stood near the center beside a large, flat-topped desk at which sat a remarkable man who immediately monopolized me. He was broad and strong and bent forward in an attitude of extraordinary intentness. He had strawyellow hair and face so florid that, taken with his attitude, I imagined at first that we had interrupted him in some outburst of anger or excitement. I realized in a moment, however, that this was anything but the case. Naturally his face was flushed; naturally, he bent forward. He had been a huge, handsome man

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who, after he had attained his growth, had been broken in two by some frightful accident. An airplane crash came to my mind as an explanation. I looked at his grey eyes, of the grey which is cold, at his cool, curt lips and his long, competent hands and I had no trouble imagining him as having been a pilot.

He was thirty, I guessed; perhaps not so much; perhaps pain had somewhat aged him; for I realized, as he moved a little, he was in some pain. This motion in his chair was his substitute for arising at the approach of the girl with me.

"Mr. Cawder, Helen," Bane said; and she nodded to him.

"Sit down, please," asked Cawder; and seeing that he held himself up from his seat with his hands, while she was standing, she quickly slipped into the chair which Bane offered her. Cawder let himself relapse.

"Flight lieutenant Carrick," Bane made introduction of me.

"Sit down," said Cawder to me and I complied. Bane sat between me and Helen Lacey. No one else was in the room. The panel,

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through which we had entered, had swung shut; as I gazed about, it was indistinguishable from the other panels. I could only guess where it was.

My glance followed the panels all around the room and I saw what made the place peculiar. It was without windows. The big broken man watched me and discerned my discovery of this feature.

"We built this room," he said to me, "a couple of years ago on the chance that we might actually need it—actually need its seclusion, I mean," he explained. "Having been brought in as you were, you cannot properly appreciate it. Our architect really deserves some credit; for this space is taken away from the other offices on the floor so cleverly that, having the plan of the other floors in mind, no one would suspect that this floor has this additional room. It was arranged when we thought we might meet with personal difficulties in proceeding with our plans. Of course we have not. Our way has opened even wider than we had hoped. The case for the feeble, fumbling order of things which people call

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popular government has become absolutely desperate.

"Some strong group must take over affairs. That is plain to you, is it not?"

He was glancing from Helen Lacey across Bane to me and back again; his eyes rested on her when he stopped so she made reply to him, with quivering lips: "That is what you are planning to do?"

"He did not tell you," said Cawder kindly, "even that?" He glanced at Bane not so patiently; and I better understood our situation. Because I was one of a pair of pilots potentially useful to him, this crippled man had sent for me. He had not sent for her; Bane had brought her because he could not himself present the plan to her. He preferred to have Cawder do it.

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{{sc|"We}} will all gain by being direct," the huge cripple continued in his quick, curt way. "We have on hand a tremendous project. Everything I am now to tell you, as well as the matters you already know—such as the killing of four flyers—must be held in your mind in proper perspective. When you grasp the immensity and dignity of our plan, you will feel that the incidents which seem to have shocked you are matters of the smallest weight. You will see that we are not cruel; we are, in fact, most merciful. We are going to substitute strength for feebleness in the administration of affairs in the swiftest and most merciful way. We estimate that we will have to kill, probably, less than ten thousand people and destroy less than two hundred millions in property to put ourselves 'in.' It will be, relative to the results we are certain to achieve, the cheapest ''coup d'etat'' in history."

He pulled himself forward on his hands, in

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his intensity. Now he let himself drop. He allowed himself, for a few seconds, to lean and dream; and, as I gazed at him, I got an idea of the manner of the original conception of this enterprize. It had formed in the brain of this big, masterful man broken by an airplane fall. It had formed, probably, on a hospital bed when racked by pain and when his enormous, natural energies, which had found outlet through the excesses of flight, had turned inward to scheming and dreaming.

I glanced at Bane, who never looked at me. He was watching the face, the posture, the hands of the girl beside him who, now, never looked at him but at the huge, crippled man across the desk whom Bane had made his ambassador of these ideas. These were not, as I realized at the time, exactly Bane's ideas. The dreams, the schemes of the two diverged; in certain aspects, indeed, they were opposed: and the grandeur of the cripple's certainty was the greater; he endowed them with the greater dignity. This was what Bane wanted Helen Lacey to hear.

"The case of democracy today of course is

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absolutely desperate," Cawder flung at us, suddenly lifting his head. "The idea of democracy, with its illusion of individual independence, could only arise in a country of little landowners, sparsely settled and living under primitive conditions; it becomes ridiculous under modern, industrial conditions. Riven the colonials, whom we call the makers of America, had to propound the absurdest fallacies to prop up their theory. That all men are born free and equal! Equal!' he mocked, "when a few—a few can fly and the rest must crawl on the ground, as they have from the beginning of the world!"

He pulled himself up nearly straight. No doubt whatever, as I saw the pride in him, that he had been a flyer.

"West Point and Annapolis take the pick of picked men, don't they?" he referred to me.

I nodded.

"How many of them, twice selected as they are, can be passed as fit to fly?"

"Perhaps one in four," I said.

He nodded. "Flyers form the small, small minority—the minority of men naturally

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superior. They are actually in a class by themselves; they compose a caste of their own, so superior and unassailable that they have only to realize it to rule. It is the day, of course, not of the majorities, but of the minorities. Russia demonstrates it; Italy proves it; the pitiable and contemptible condition of law enforcement on this continent proclaims it to the skies. To the skies!" he repeated, liking the phrase.

He pushed back, jerking open a drawer beside him.

"A few years ago, after an event the effects of which must be obvious to you, I found myself confronted by the necessity of providing for myself under certain handicaps. I had never been a docile or patient person. I happened to meet with another man, also neither docile or patient. Not he," Cawder absolved Bane from this connection; and I became more sure that differences divided Cawder and Bane. "Another person," Cawder continued, "who teamed with me to take, for ourselves, what we wanted where and when we wanted it.

"I will confess to you—laughable as it now

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seems—that I went into this imagining that I would find a certain thrill in risks to be run—risks of my life, perhaps, or at least of imprisonment.

"Of course, I was even then familiar with the ridiculous record of law enforcement: yet I did not shake myself free, at first, of the idea that I was courting danger." He laughed shortly.

"A man with a pistol may do what he pleases at almost any time on almost any street. For years it has been so. A few men with bombs—not bombs in any real sense, either, but only home-made handgrenades, a half pint of nitroglycerin in six inches of steel pipe—can dictate to a whole trade or to a section of a city. They tell a citizen to change his methods in his shop or to close his shop, to go out of business and move away—and he closes his shop or is blown up. They tell him to pay—and he pays. Citizens so threatened dare scarcely speak even when surrounded by police and promised protection. That is the power of an occasional half pint of nitroglycerin tossed from the tail of an automobile."
{{nop}}

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He laughed again and delved in his drawer.

"That is something of the power of direct methods, when applied in only half pint packages; here is something of the honor and respect in which men, who deal in directness are held. Here are a few letters to me, begging favors, thanking me, fawning on me—from politicians, governors, national figures, collectors and disbursers of campaign purses. Would you like to look at them?" He offered them to the girl beside Bane.

She shook her head. She was biting her lips and trembling; her cheeks were chalk white. Bane watched her.

"You doubt their authenticity?" Cawder challenged her.

Again she shook her head; and Cawder glanced at Bane. He wanted to help Bane with her and he was aware that he was not making much headway. He said, "I remember, your father is an important politician in his state."

"That's enough of that," put in Bane, suddenly defending her.

"Oh, all right," agreed Cawder, confirming

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my idea that he had, himself, no interest in her conversion. He referred tome. "Would you like to see these?"

"No," I said. "I know that such things are."

"Then you are exceedingly stupid," Cawder caught me up sharply, "to know nothing more." He struck, suddenly, the side of his chair. "Man alive and flying! If half a pint of nitro tossed from the tail of a motor-car can supercede law and impose obedience, what do you figure to be the power of a few airplanes with ton bombs of TNT? Don't you see that we can do whatever we like? We have them absolutely at our mercy! How they lie down and cringe and crawl and dare scarcely speak before the threat of half a pint of nitro tossed from a motor-car! What will they do, or what will they refuse to do, if we order it and back our orders by a few ton bombs of TNT dropped on them out of the sky?"

"They?" Helen Lacey cried. "They? who do you mean? They?"

Cawder returned to her. "They?" he repeated. "The people who imagine they rule.

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Nothing is more trite nor true than the observation that history repeats itself. The same causes always create the same conditions. It is inevitable. It must be so. Therefore, the day of democracy is done. The airplane brings in another state of affairs—the airplane with its tremendous powers put in the hands of the few who can fly.

"With flying, feudalism returns. It is idle to deny it. It must be so. What created the former feudalism? What established and supported the knights who for centuries ruled the world? Armor and the strength and skill to wear mail and weild the sword—superior equipment in the possession of the few. When gunpowder was invented and any fool with an arquebus became as powerful as a knight, feudalism was done; weapons made everyone equal. But at last the airplane, with TNT, puts back the overwhelming advantage of equipment in the hands of the few."

He sat back, resting on his huge hands. "We shall establish ourselves with the greatest ease. We shall strike hard and swiftly once; twice; perhaps a third time may be necessary;

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but I doubt it. Modern society concentrates its vital points most conveniently for us. If we had ourselves devised and ordered a method of grouping the millions of people to put them at our mercy, we could not have improved upon the present organization of things. No; we shall give two illustrations of what we can do; and no one will ask any more. They will ask us only what we want; and they will give it to us, whatever it is."

"You mean," said Helen Lacey's quivering lips, "you mean, by striking, you are going to drop your ton bombs upon some city?"

"Not necessarily," Bane put in before Cawder could answer. "Perhaps we strike first a ship at sea. There is something peculiarly impressive about the destruction of a ship at sea. The loss on board the ''Titanic'' was nothing in comparison to earthquakes; but the ''Titanic'' took the popular imagination as no other disaster until another ship like it was sunk, when the ''Lusitania'' was sent down."

"Perhaps you had better proceed," suggested Cawder coldly.

"I suppose," continued Bane, ignoring him,

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"it is the completeness of it; nothing left; not even ruins."

Cawder sat back, interposing nothing more; and Bane became silent. Perfectly evident again was a difference between them; momentarily, indeed it had developed to open opposition.

"This is enough for tonight," said Cawder, dismissing us and he lifted himself on his hands as he had done when we had entered. It was his substitute for rising.

Helen Lacey noticed this and, as she had swiftly seated herself to let him relax, now she arose and followed Bane. I went with them toward the panel door which had opened. That is, I thought it was the door, the same which had admitted us, until in the passage I discovered that we were led in another direction. We came, in fact, not to the outer office of the deserted desks but to a small inner room, windowless like Cawder's office and undoubtedly created from space stolen from the offices which opened, honestly, on the hallways. It was furnished with a couch, table and chairs—a cubby for temporary detention, obviously.
{{nop}}

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Bane ushered us into it; but his mind was not with us. He brooded upon his contest with Cawder; and abruptly, without a word to us, he left us.

I pushed nearly shut the panel behind him. One hand sufficed for this; my other grasped, and was grasped by, her hand. I faced her and my arms went about her to try to combat the terror in her eyes and upon her lips.

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{{sc|"He}}'s going to do it! The other—he's just talking yet. He's not ready yet, even if he wants to do it. But ''he—he's'' ready and he's going to do it."

"Yes," I said; there was no denying it. He—the he who was ready and would do it—of course was Bane. The other was Cawder. There was no confusion between us; we felt the same thing. Cawder, the cripple, had first conceived the frightful enterprise. Broken in body and inverted in soul by his awful injury, he had found vent for his tremendous energies in a grandiloquent dream. His cynicism, consequent to his injury, became increased in his partnership with gunmen, blackmailers, bootleggers and the gentry who enriched and empowered themselves through terrorizing with bombs. Not real bombs, as Cawder had said; only home-made-grenades.

Naturally, having been a flyer, he knew of real bombs; and his mind multiplied the effect

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of the half pint grenades by two thousand pounds of TNT and gave him the picture which he saw.

So, on his bed or in his chair where he had to hold himself up with his hands, he began amusing himself with building his plan and talking about it.

He might merely have continued to talk, had not Bane come in. His talk and his scheme struck dry tinder in Bane's broken mind; it fired Bane's mood. Bane seized the idea and, not bound to any bed nor to any chair where he had to hold himself upright with his hands, Bane busied himself. He recruited men from Cawder's organization to practice what Cawder preached. Bane became the driving force, driving—or attempting to drive—Cawder himself.

For Cawder was holding back; Cawder still talked only of the grandiloquent scheme which could never be completely prepared. Bane moved for immediate results; he had in hand a project which he could pursue.

"He has his airplanes and bombs to attack a ship at sea!"
{{nop}}

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"Yes," I said; there was no denying that.

"A passenger ship—a great one like the ''Lusitania!"''

"I brought him to it."

"Not you!"

"Father and I."

"You may still stop him!" I said, holding her tight under my hands.

"How?"

"He's coming back," I said, and released her.

"Cawder," said Bane, pushing the panel, "will talk to you again."

I started with her.

"Not you," said Bane and thrust me off. He was distinctly triumphant; he had won his point against Cawder.

"I want to talk to Mr. Cawder," said Helen; and I made no further useless protest. Bane led her away and closed the panel, confining me. For a few seconds I heard their steps; then, nothing more. No one returned. I was shut in the little cubby where at last, after long resultless wondering about her—where she

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was, what she did or what had been done with her and what would be done with me—I finally slept. For at four o'clock, when the panel was opened, my callers had to awaken me.

They were a pair of men of the type of Sander and Larkin; and their errand was to escort me to the roof where it was dawn and where a two-seater airplane stood ready to fly.

"Mr. Bane?" I questioned them.

"He's gone ahead."

"East?" I asked.

"Ahead," was all they would tell me; and their answers regarding Miss Lacey were the same. She had gone "ahead" with Mr. Bane. Of Cawder, they vouchsafed nothing at all.

They invited me into the passenger's seat of the airplane; and the invitation left me no option. When I was seated, they applied straps of the familiar sort which hold a pilot, or a passenger, in place when an airplane tilts. Suddenly they added another strap, binding my hands together behind me and with a steel band, they locked my wrists.

One man went to the pilot's pit. After a moment, we were in the air. Eastward,

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toward the sunrise, we flew; and except that I was strapped and fettered, I did not feel anything extraordinary in the flight until we were fifty miles from the city and over Indiana farmland.

Then the pilot stood up, climbed from his pit and went out upon the right wing. The monoplane maintained its steady flight. Still this did not amaze me; for an airplane, without guidance, is likely to cling to its course for a while.

I saw, then, my pilot play with the little guide parachute over the pack on his back. He was preparing to jump. He jumped!

Below me and behind, his parachute opened; his fall became a float. I was alone, strapped—and fettered, in the passenger seat of the mono plane.

Still it stayed steady; still it clung to its course, correcting itself by slight shifts of the controls which could not be wholly automatic. So I realized what was being done with me.

I had been put aboard an airplane like the effigy's, a monoplane with radio controls. A pilot in another plane held my fate. Bane?

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I wondered. I searched the sunrise for sight of the control machine. Bane? And was she with him?

My passage westward, I have said, had been mere transportation. My return, I realized, was to be anything but that.

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{{sc|Each}} of two airplanes was near enough to be, conceivably, the machine which controlled me. On my right, a large, lumbering biplane accompanied me at a distance of a thousand feet. It had the contour of a machine of the Ohio air express; and I took it for a day freighter which had left Chicago at dawn. On my left, and a little higher, flew a monoplane of the passenger type and of a size to be a three-seater.

I did not identify its contours; it was of an individual type; and as it kept pace with me—or I was made to keep pace with it—this soon betrayed it as the plane which piloted me.

Other airplanes approached, westbound, and passed at various distances and altitudes. I was up five thousand feet and flying evenly enough. I felt no relaxing of the radio control; on the contrary, I felt its stiffness and rigidity. With quick, sudden shifts of rudder

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or ailerons, my course was corrected and I was kept five hundred feet in front of and slightly below Bane.

It was impossible visually to recognize him in the three-seater; I could get, now and then, only a glimpse of three heads; but I felt Bane's abrupt, decisive hands in the piloting manœuvers which reached me through the radio. The style was the same which I had witnessed in the flight of the radio-controlled monoplane which had borne the effigy.

Of the three heads in the monoplane which drove me, I imagined that the middle was feminine; but I could not see it. I had the word of my pilot, who had leaped, that Miss Lacey had gone ahead with Mr. Bane; and I believed it. He would have her with him; and he had gone ahead but here, over the farm land where my pilot had leaped, Bane had awaited me.

I felt him, I say, take me firmly in hand; now I felt him begin to amuse himself with me, skimming me altogether too close to a single-seater biplane piloted by some amateur,

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evidently, who was up for practice in the quiet air of dawn.

I almost sent the fellow into a tail spin; and I came through, sweating cold from sitting strapped in my seat, helpless to touch a control. A big cabin machine appeared and Bane either intentionally ignored it or noticed it too late to make me graze it. I passed it with a space of five hundred feet between us and found myself climbing.

From the east and fifteen hundred feet higher flew a mail plane. I knew the contour and I thought of the mail-flyer who had been discussed on the terrace. I was climbing to reach the level of this mail machine and, also, was pointed at it.

The three seater, which guided me, also climbed; for the proper position for control was slightly above me and behind. Playing with me, was he? I wondered; and was his sense of sport to remain satisfied with sending me skimming past another machine? Or would he send me into this one, deliberately?

That depended, I thought, upon whether one of the heads in that three-seater was fem-

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inine, whether she was aboard. If she was, probably he would continue merely to play with me; probably I would not be deliberately driven into another plane. He would continue to show her how close he could skim me by and not strike.

Sweating in my palms and on the soles of my feet, I passed the mail-plane with the mail pilot turned and staring at me. He thought me a show-off, I suppose, flying at him and holding my hands behind my back as I went by.

But I went by. So she was aboard the three-seater; and after this, either she succeeded in preventing more exhibitions of this sort or it ceased to amuse him. He sent me far off to the side, recalled me, crossing me in front of him, tipped me, "banked" me and turned me over.

I flew upside down, the straps over my shoulders holding me in. He righted me. A few minutes later, he did the worst of all. He ceased to play with me; he ceased to pilot me; he let his hold on me lapse. The stiffness and the rigidity of his grasp was gone; the quick,

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sudden shifts stopped. I was flying by grace of engine power and inherent stability.

I squirmed in my straps as I felt it. I was helpless, seven thousand feet up, with my throttle full open, flying full speed, wild and unpiloted—with the controls four feet in front of me which I could not touch. I felt myself amuck, a crazy missile in the sky. I shot up, slanting to the left, tipped and started to dive. With the engine on full it frightfully increased the pull of gravity; I zoomed with the ground rushing up to me—when the radio caught me again.

It leveled me off, straightened me and sent me ahead of the three-seater once more; and held me there, as on a leash, for an hour. We were over Ohio, with Lake Erie lying on the left, when I was sent circling and the three-seater passed me and flew on far ahead.

Still circling, I watched it go eastward and diminish to a speck. It was inconceivable that it still piloted me; yet I was piloted, for I was circling, level and steady; but the character of the control had changed. Another pilot, not so abrupt and positive, held me in his hand.

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He was on the ground, I realized; for no other airplane was in sight until one rose with two men aboard.

They flew above me, while the ground pilot kept me level and steady. The extra man in the new plane came aboard and brought me down to an unmarked meadow next to what appeared to be an ordinary farmhouse. Neither the pilot nor the two mechanics who inspected my machine furnished me any account of Bane or of Cawder. It was a stop for fuel, they told me; and immediately the pilot took me on.

He remained at the controls, not leaping and returning me to radio guidance, after we were again in the air; he brought me over the mountains and to the lake in the hold in the hills.

Having wheels, not pontoons, we landed on the green lawn to the east of the water where an empty three-seater stood, its engine giving off heat vapors.

The drawn-up doors of hangars displayed a dozen single-seaters, two-seaters, three and four, at which mechanics tinkered and tuned.

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Donley directed some of them; and I saw the red head of Kinvarra bent in an intent inspection.

A blue seaplane, of the pattern of the effigy's, taxi-ed on the lake and the beach clattered, was silent, and clattered again with a motor-testing. The air of final preparations pervaded the place—practical, careful preparations.

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{{sc|Donley}} approached me and Kinvarra straightened for a stare at me. Nothing in their manner today indicated consideration of me as a prospective partner; I had passed into another category as regards them. Donley nodded to me coolly—very coolly—and cautioned the mechanic who unstrapped me, so that I could rise from the seat, "Leave his hands as they are."

"How long has Bane been back?" I asked Donley who debated before he decided to inform me.

"A little while."

"Miss Lacey with him?"

"Yes."

"Logan still here?"

"At the house," said Donley and returned to Kinvarra.

I saw them beside the airplanes not as pilots but, today, as glorified gunmen. Nothing of the dreamer or of the impossibilist adhered

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to these two—or to Boggs and Mendell for that matter. Much more definitely than yesterday I was able to place them—gunmen from Cawder's criminal organization, gunmen trained to the modern vehicle, the airplane, and introduced to the modern weapon, the airplane bomb.

Much more positively than yesterday, they impressed me as purely practical souls adhering to Bane because he had started something which they would carry out as they pleased and for their own purposes and ends. No; nothing of the impractical about them. Bane had trained them and put into their hands tremendous engines of destruction which they would employ for no fanciful revenge upon society but for loot for themselves and their women.

I was thrust into an automobile; and after three minutes, arrived at the terrace where, as yesterday, ladies lounged; but their temper, too, was changed. The atmosphere also was of completed preparations, contemplation of great gains to be got—and risks to be run.

Donley's bride, more over-rouged and with

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her bleached hair fuzzier, perched on a stone balustrade overlooking the lake and puffed, with imperfect complaisance, at her cigarette while she turned the diamond rings on her fingers. She dreamed, not of taking over authority, but of bigger diamonds and more of them. Mendell's beloved stood on the tile pavement tossing grain to doves and dreamed, I was sure, not of domination, but of brighter silks for her body, richer food and service.

Sally Gessler arose from an inconspicuous seat in the shadow.

"So you're back," she said with some satisfaction; and the sight of her partly reassured me. "You must have been kept going."

"I've been moving," I agreed.

"Danced you, did they?"

"Is that what they call it? Yes; they did."

She considered me, with her dark {{hinc|eyelids}}, naturally heavy and languorous, drooped over her green irises which were bright with excitement. Gin supplied some of the stimulation; perhaps a drug helped with the brightness; but there were other excitations too.

She seemed thinner than yesterday, drawing

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her dress with her long hands close to her figure. This was a reflex habit; she was making no particular play for me, except as she assigned me to a scheme of her own running concurrently with the greater enterprise about her and running somewhat, at least, contrary to it.

"You've had company most of the time?" she inquired. This of course, was why she stopped me; she wanted to know whether Bane had kept me with him and with her rival when in Chicago.

"Not too much," I told her and asked, "Where's Logan?"

"He's inside," she replied, accenting it in a way I was shortly to understand. My guide pushed me toward the house whither I proceeded readily enough after I had glanced through the open doorway.

Helen Lacey hovered in the entry awaiting me. Bane was not about; nor did she expect him suddenly to appear. For the moment, she was free of him; that was what I gathered at my glimpse of her. She wanted the moment with me.
{{nop}}

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The imminence of the enterprise, which excited the others, terrified her. She had learned the plan.

She looked at me but did not speak to me; she said to my guard, "You may leave Lieutenant Carrick with me."

"I'm to put him with Lieutenant Logan," the man replied.

"Who told you?" she demanded.

"Mr. Donley; he said it was Mr. Bane's orders."

"That must have been before I saw Mr. Bane; he's just been here with me. You may leave Lieutenant Carrick with me."

If she failed to convince, she succeeded in confusing him.

At best, her situation with regard to Bane must have puzzled the mechanics and pilots quartered across the lake. It was none too plain to the pilots in the house. Kvery one knew that Bane craved her praise and approval; everyone knew she had certain influence with him. So the man modified his original intentions and let me accompany her into the library.
{{nop}}

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To be sure, he followed to the door and he made no move to unlock my hands. She did not risk the mistake of requesting it, but she did close the door upon him. There was no other door to the room and the windows on that side overlooked a sheer drop to deep water, so he contented himself with standing sentinel.

She glanced out the window and what she saw held her for a moment fascinated in her fright. With one hand, she clasped my arm, with the other she pointed across the lake where a crew was launching a seaplane.

"See; they've just changed another and are putting it into the water."

"Another what?" I asked.

"Another land machine into a seaplane; they're taking off all the wheels and putting on pontoons. They've decided on the ship attack; they're striking at sea!"

"When?"

"Tomorrow—early tomorrow morning. He's told me the time."

"What are they striking? What ship?"
{{nop}}

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"He hasn't told me that. He said, I'd see. But it's the ''Wotan,'' I know. It's the ''Wotan!"''

"The {{iinc|Wotan}}!" I repeated.

"The new big ship! The greatest ship on the seas! Here! Here's what it is; here's what it has aboard! It's making its maiden voyage now, you know. Here!"

She picked up a newspaper, showed it to me and then spread it for me upon a table while I bent over to read.

The ''Wotan,'' just completed and the greatest and fastest ship on the water, was making its maiden trip. Fifty millions it had cost; ten thousand passengers it carried; a newspaper column was crowded with the list of only the most famous names. It was bringing over Rembrandts', Rubens' and Raphaels' for which the Metropolitan museum had paid ten millions; ten millions in stones from Amsterdam, emeralds, rubies and Rand diamonds were aboard; twenty million more was in platinum and gold bullion.

The vessel was due at New York tomorrow noon.

I straightened, staring at her; and I better

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understood Donley's and Kinvarra's caution with me and, also the absent-mindedness of the ladies on the terrace. Before them lay loot—loot gathered in one place and put at their mercy—beyond dreams of buccaneers. Forty millions for the trouble of the taking; five or ten millions more, perhaps, if they bothered to despoil, personally, the passengers.

The airplane put the plan—almost any plan—within their power. With airplanes and bombs, and night to cover them, they could fly and at dawn do whatever it pleased them to do—if no warning went before them.

"Where's your father?" I asked her and she winced.

"Here; but I haven't seen him. They won't let me."

"They've locked him up?"

"Yes."

"Logan's here?"

"He's locked up too."

"Then they're locking me up."

"That's it."

"That all?" I asked.

"All?" she echoed and shivered. "What do you mean?"
{{nop}}

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"Did he bring me back just to lock me up here?"

"He's some idea of his own with you," she said, suddenly, tightening her clasp on my arm. "I was with him this morning, you know."

"I thought so," I told her. "Who was the third with you?"

"A new pilot he was bringing on from Chicago."

"Who danced me? Bane himself, wasn't it?"

She nodded, her little fingers clinging close tome. "I thought, once, he had killed you."

"I thought he might, by accident," I admitted. "But I didn't think he would purposely, while you were with him."

"I begged for you, of course," she said. "I begged for you."

"I was sure you did."

"He let you off—but he'll not let off the ship! The rest of them mean simply to rob; they're after the diamonds and gold. But he—you've heard him."

"I've heard him," I said.

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{{sc|Bane}} flung back the door. The force and abruptness of it declared him before we saw him.

"Here you are!" he greeted me. "Had your little talk, have you?"

"We've had a little talk," I admitted, manifestly.

"I was sending you," he mocked me by exaggerated deference in his manner, "up to your room to rest. You've been through a bit: and you've rather more before you. You want rest; you'd better go to your room."

I stepped into the hallway with him. He was the stronger; the mechanic was there; also my hands were cuffed together with steel. The moment, however, probably offered my best chance of escape and I tried to take it with the result that I was flung down, allowed to rise and thereupon led to a little room in one of the rounded towers which presided over the lake.
{{nop}}

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The mechanic twisted at the band about my wrists and removed the cuffs before he left me. He merely locked me in and I was perfectly prisoned.

The door of the little room proved, upon investigation, to be of steel grained like wood; the two windows were tall and mullioned. Exteriorly, or if considered casually from within, they appeared to have been designed simply for a picturesque effect; but actually the stone mullions divided the panes into such narrow slits that no one possibly could press through.

I heard through the ceiling the steady pacing of feet and I realized that above me was a similar room confining Pete, probably.

With respect to Pete also, Bane had some idea of his own. Undoubtedly before Pete, as well as before myself, stretched a considerable experience; and before the girl who blamed herself for it all.

Where was she? With Bane? Or locked up like me?

Through the tall slits between the mullions, I inspected the lake and the bit of beach where wheels were being removed from monoplanes

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and pontoons put on. One by one, separately always to avoid show of many machines, the seaplanes rose, were tested and returned.

Single-seaters and two-seaters with machine guns, they were. The great weight-carriers for the ton bombs were not hangared here. This place specialized in the combat and pursuit types—and radio controlled machines run by automatons.

These were the escorts and protectors of the bombing biplanes being mustered elsewhere—just over the hills, perhaps, upon another lake or on waters a hundred miles away. Or perhaps they were being prepared singly, not to be gathered and squadroned until tomorrow's dawn when they would be drawn, by radio commands, to the determined positions in the path of the ''Wotan,'' on her maiden voyage, with her great passenger list, her cargo of paintings, diamonds, emeralds, platinum and gold.

How simply the airplanes could strike, with no warning given!

I thought, now, not of mere robbery and the seizure of the ship under the threat of

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bombs. I thought of the ton bombs poised under airplanes hovering above the ship—and of Bane's broken brain. I went again to the steel panels of the door. I went to the window and tried with my pocket knife to pick the mortar from between the stones of the mullions.

With my supper—I supposed they would send me supper—I might procure a better implement. But with my supper something different arrived.

A servant, accompanied by another who attended to the opening and fastening of the door, laid a tray and departed.

I sat at the little table, shaking out the napkin which lay on the tray, when in the center of the clean white square of linen, three pencilled numerals caught my eye, ''18—35—21.''

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{{sc|The}} figures were faint but freshly written, without blurring. They bore no resemblance to a laundry mark. They suggested to me a message.

Their interpretation, at that moment, was wholly puzzling, but their purpose seemed to me, clearly, to convey some information of special and highly personal significance. A girl had pencilled them, I thought. They were large and flourishy figures with feminine twists; and, as I looked at them, I thought of not Helen Lacey but Sally Gessler.

Of course I examined everything else on the tray and the tray itself; but nothing explained them. There they were by themselves, in their pencilled flourishes; and they had been sent to me to tell me, what?

They might be intelligence of the strength of airplane squadrons; they might refer to distances; they might apply to—anything. But whatever their interpretation, already

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they meant to me that someone in the house was secretly scheming forme. And this someone, I believed to be Sally Gessler.

I knew that Helen Lacey would help me, if she could; and it might be that she had pencilled these figures; but they attached in my mind to Sally and her particular sort of scheming against Bane.

I dampened the center of the napkin, obliterated the figures and ate supper with better appetite than I would have credited a few minutes before. Something more promising than the chance of my removing a stone mullion in a tower window, was afoot in the house.

The same servants who had brought the tray, removed it together with the tableware and the napkin now innocent of numerals. Nothing else was sent me; no one else called. Night spread over the cloudless and moonless sky.

The first hour of darkness continued like the day; airplanes pushed into the water, rose and were tested; airscrews drummed and droned; lights streaked across the stars and the spread of wings eclipsed the constellations.

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But shortly after nine o'clock, this ceased. The sky, the lake, the land became silent. Lights switched out; everything and everyone was prepared for the enterprise of the morning which would proceed, undoubtedly, as it was planned.

I lay down, trying to picture the enterprise prevented. How? By warning to Pete's and my seaplane squadron? What warning would have reached them?

Probably they had found Pete's machine wrecked on the sea; so they had reported him lost after a parachute jump. Me, they would have reported as lost, machine and all. Our disappearance must have puzzled them; but it would have given them no real warning.

I lay trying to sleep but succeeded at semiconsciousness only in which suddenly I was jerked by the shock of the sensation of being "danced", with my hands cuffed with steel, in an airplane with radio control—and a madman running the radio. That was what Bane meant by the bit I'd been through with rather more before me. Rather more before Pete, too? And what before her?
{{nop}}

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I twisted over, clutching at the couch.

My door was opened, without any preliminary rap, by two men who switched on the light and-returned to me my own clothing.

"You're flying today; put these on," one commanded me.

Flying? Yesterday I had flown, being "danced"; then my borrowed garments had sufficed. There was a new implication this morning.

I did not imagine that Bane's mind was so broken that he fancied me converted to his plan; no, he had some other idea of his own regarding me. It involved me in flight, perhaps "dancing" again. Nevertheless, I put on my own clothes and was led out under the stars. The time was three.

Women and men whispered and embraced on the terrace; I made out Mendell's voice and his wife's sobbing a goodbye; I heard Sally Gessler speak; Boggs replied. I listened and looked, in the starlight, for Helen Lacey. She was not discoverable by me.

Pete spoke to me, "Hello".
{{nop}}

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I answered and they pulled us further apart, escorting him first to the pier.

Airplanes were rising from the lake; the darkness drummed with their drone. They put Pete in a boat and shoved me aboard another which was rowed out to a moored monoplane; and as I stood in the boat, I heard Helen Lacey's voice:

"You said I'd be with you."

"You'll be with me," replied Bane.

"No!" This came in a cry of protest. It was not a reply to him; she was trying, helplessly, to stop something which was being done.

"All right now," said Bane. "You'll be all right; you'll come back—if I do."

She made no reply. A monoplane flew up from the water; immediately another followed it.

I was thrust aboard the seaplane beside which I stood and lifted into the seat pit.

Expecting to have my hands cuffed behind me as yesterday, I grasped a control wheel in front of me. No one opposed this, except to shift my hands slightly whereupon a steel clamp came down. Someone twisted a lock bar

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and secured me; someone else buckled the ordinary straps over my shoulders.

I yelled across the water to warn Pete, in case they were trying the same trick with him and a shout of his echoed to me. They had trussed us both; and though a pilot remained with me, I knew it was only to take me into the air.

When he had me high over the lake, he leaped and I was alone again, flying with my, hands clamped to a wheel which was only a dummy. It connected with no controls; the actual control was by radio.

I was swung to right, to left, lifted a little and jerked left again. This did not feel like the "dancing" of yesterday. Other airplanes flew in front and behind me and on both sides. I was aware that I was manœuvered to put me in alignment in some formation.

A plane passed me close; but I thought it was unintentional. It blundered by so stupidly that I was sure that it also was run by radio. I saw a head and shoulders before the stars. It might have been another man, trussed like me; it might have been a wood and wax effigy.

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His head did not move and he had no guidance of his plane.

Someone, however, pulled him into position; the squadron straightened and flew toward the dawn. Not only the stars now gave direction; the east evidenced itself with a pallid promise of light. Eight machines composed the squadron in which I flew—eight monoplanes proceeding by pairs; for we held no real squadron formation. In front of me, flew two machines—the one which had nearly hit me and another which seemed to control it. Behind me was a machine which, I felt, piloted me. On my right, flew two similar pairs.

Four radio-controlled machines, four manpiloted monoplanes composed our squadron. At a distance to my left, and too dimly seen to be counted, flew another formation; and we all flew fast. The early morning lights of New Jersey towns and cities twinkled below us and before the east paled grey we picked up the glow of New York and passed it southward, putting out over the sea and holding, on our left, Long Island.

We were flying, relative to the air, five miles

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a minute, I estimated, and the drift of the sky favored us as I could witness from the smoke of steamers as we swept out to sea. It was not yet twenty minutes since we had risen from the lake in the hills and we were over the ocean in force, commanding the sky and the water with power to work whatever we wished.

Because the machines in my immediate squadron flew in four pairs, I supposed that the four subordinates of the luncheon table on the terrace were the pilots—Boggs and Donley, Mendell and Kinvarra. Bane was not in this formation, I believed. I was sure, at least, that he was not piloting me; for the impulses which swung me to right or left and increased or decreased the speed of my engine, to keep me in position, reached me in manner unlike yesterday. Another hand held me. Other hands held Pete and the two effigies in the other radio-controlled machines. The dawn was displaying them to me.

In front of me flew, first, a monoplane with a dummy in the pilot's pit; behind it flew Boggs, I believed. On my right flew another

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effigy of a man; next Donley, I thought; then flew Pete, cuffed and strapped. I guessed that Mendell controlled him and Kinvarra steered me. But I could feel, by the way we all were steered and shifted, that command was not in our squadron; our whole formation obeyed orders from elsewhere. This elsewhere must be the squadron of six machines which had started the journey on our left but which now was flying below us.

Rather, we had risen above this other squadron, which had held to a height of five thousand feet. We flew at eight thousand, I guessed.

Four of them were double or triple-seaters; two seemed to be singles. One of the big machines was the flag-ship, undoubtedly. Bane was aboard it. Aboard it with him, ''was she?''

In my ears, with the drum of the motors, was her cry which had come to me in the darkness on the lake:

{{" '}}You said I'd be with you!{{' "}}

{{" '}}You'll be with me,{{' "}} said Bane.

{{" '}}No!{{' "}}

From the north emerged four larger ma-

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chines—biplanes with long, lozenge-like pendants below them. Bombers, they were—the seaplanes bearing Bane's ton bombs of TNT. Their appearance caused only slight shift of our course; their timing was almost perfect for their appointment. Undoubtedly they talked, back and forth by radio, with our flag-ship; and after they joined us, our speed decreased to theirs. They flew lowest, perhaps two thousand feet above the sea.

On the ocean lay a sharp elliptical seed. The white wash of a wake declared that it moved but its advance was so slow in comparison to ours that it seemed simply to lie on the sea and swell as we flew at it.

Toward it we leaped at three levels, the four bombing biplanes lowest; above them, the squadron of six; then, we. Swiftly, in the magic manner of objects approached by airplane, the seed expanded and lengthened and stood out of the water until it became a ship. A minute more, and it was no mere ship. Longer and wider and higher out of the ocean it grew until it became, beyond doubt, the ''Wotan'' on her maiden voyage, the greatest vessel on the seas!

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{{sc|The}} roll of the passengers ran in my mind and the catalogue of the loot, as I watched the bombing biplanes descend. They flew in straight for the ship and from below the first plane in line, a bomb was released.

Down and looping slightly forward, the bomb dropped and struck the water beside the ship. It dotted the sea with a spot of white; the white mightily erupted and upheaved. I watched the water no longer. I stared at the ship.

Its lights were out. That, I saw, before a saw it stagger. It swayed, swung and lurched to the right. The terrific shock of the ex—plosion first had registered on the electrical installation; then seams opened, the engines stopped, steering was smashed. Momentum only bore the ''Wotan'' on. With the lights, the radio likely had been wrecked; it could send no call for help, no appeal to the shore.

From my height overhead, I could see on

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the sky-deck only little specks appearing, clustering and scattering and clustering thicker as more pushed up from below—passengers they were, I knew; people in pandemonium scrambling and screaming for the boats.

Yet I saw, too, that discipline survived among the crew. Below, electricians worked at the lights and, beyond doubt, also at the radio; for the lights flashed on.

Instantly another bomb went down on the other side. It burst and lights went out and stayed out. The specks on the sky-deck shook and scattered at the shock like little shot on a tray which is tapped. The helplessness of the ship had passed beyond Bane's boast. If he had miscalculated, his error had been in the overuse of his power; the ship might not remain afloat long enough to be looted.

Those clustering, scrambling specks about the boats on the sky-deck—those specks which were men and women and children—proclaimed that the passengers were sure that the ship was sinking.

Far away, beyond sight from the ''Wotan,'' I saw a steamer; in a different direction, an-

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other; a third. None was near enough for quick aid; and I know that none had been summoned. If one blundered up, a bomb from a biplane would wreck it too. No aid could come from the water. I looked about the air.

A plane appeared from the direction of land and already, as I looked at it, I was jerked about to meet it. Kinvarra, behind me, swung his plane toward it, too, and we flew at it together. He sent me ahead of him, in the position in which I was most easily guided, and I flew for the approaching plane head on.

The strange airplane flew, curious only, not yet suspicious. He hardly had time to become suspicious, that pilot. Far away he had sighted a fleet of airplanes over a ship and he wondered what they were doing; then we were at him.

I was at him, first—I with no power to pilot, with no hand upon any control. For all purposes, I might have been an effigy in the pilot's pit with a machine-gun before me. I could do nothing to save the other plane—or myself, if we smashed.
{{nop}}

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I knew that sometimes, as when Pete had been knocked out of the sky, the automatic monoplane had held to the air; but, in spite of its special strengthening, this must have been accident, mostly. I could not expect to stay up, if we smashed. Kinvarra could not expect me to.

Not that I imagined he cared what happened to me. He was making me a part of a missile hurled at the curious airplane. No; he was making me, instead, a dummy machine-gunner. For the gun in front of me suddenly clacked; and the curious airplane, approaching, dove to the right.

For a few seconds, while I pointed at nothing, the machine-gun before me continued to fire. Then Kinvarra turned it off. He turned off, indeed, all control of me; for I had the sensation, as yesterday, of flying helpless and without guidance at all. Kinvarra had let me go, forgotten me while he dived after the other airplane. He shot it down and flattened his own flight. For a few seconds more, while he watched it and I watched him straining in my straps to make him remember me, he let me

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fly without control; then I felt him returning attention to me; control caught me; and I sank in my straps, sweating. Suppose the strange, inquiring machine had been a fighting plane and shot Kinvarra down!

It had borne no arms at all; it merely had blundered by to see what was going on and had been shot down, therefore, like a bystander witnessing a crime in a street.

Kinvarra was swinging me and himself back toward the ship. Above it, three biplanes, with their bombs like great evil eggs below them, steadily circled; higher, circled the six machines of Bane's immediate command. The other six of our squadron clung to the ceiling. The fourth bomb-bearer I did not see. I scanned the water about the ''Wotan.''

The little boats, speckled with thick clusters of dots which were men, women and children, were being launched on the left side; for the ship, in settling, listed to the left. It listed so far, indeed, that launching appeared to be impossible on the right; at least, on that side no boats reached the water. I could see, on the sky-deck, the scrambling specks trying to push

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starboard boats over to port to be dropped from the davits.

Now I discovered the missing biplane on the water beside the sinking ''Wotan,'' on the right. The biplane had no bombs now; it had been lightened and become a cargo carrier, capable of taking on two tons dead weight; so it was alongside, demanding—undoubtedly—the jewels and platinum and the thousands of pounds of bullion gold.

The ship seemed to refuse or delay the delivery of it. Perhaps, in the panic, someone attacked the biplane's crew; for a signal went from the biplane on the water to the bombers in the air. And one of the evil eggs went down.

Not so near the ship; not so near as the first two. Perhaps some mite of mercy moved the hand releasing that third ton of TNT; perhaps the hand considered solely that it must not too greatly hasten the sinking of the ship. The bomb splashed and burst to the left of the ''Wotan,'' on the opposite side from the biplane on the water, on the same side as the little boats which were launched all acluster

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with the specks which were men and women and children fleeing the ship.

I watched the wave, from the burst of the bomb, sweep upon them; I watched it toss and swamp them and smash them against the flank of the ship. I watched, wrenching at my wrists in the clamps binding me; and, watching helpless to move a hand, I thought of Helen Lacey, in some airplane below there with Bane, also watching and seeing the little boats, crowded with specks, become boat bottoms and the specks bestrew the sea. In some way like me, she was held, I supposed—held and shown what I had seen and was to see.

The ship and all its people utterly at Bane's mercy, as he had boasted. With the roar of the airscrew, his boast rang in my head: "How they heap up wealth which they can not possibly defend from me! How they organize and superorganize themselves to make themselves safe, and then make airplanes and TNT and—me!"

In one of those airplanes below me, he sat staring down at those specks struggling in the sea; and triumph throbbed in his broken

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brain—triumph as he displayed his power to her and to Pete and tome. For I knew now that part of his purpose with us was to show us his words made true. Before us, he had boasted; before us, he would spread the proof.

Kinvarra, Donley and the rest—pirates in soul—held no concern with this. But no more mercy moved them; they were out for business; and their business was to rob the ship. So like bandits blowing a train from a trestle to despoil an express car, they would kill without pity for their purposes.

From the left of the sinking ship, little boats again dropped into the water—little boats covered with specks which were people who had seen, beyond doubt, the fate of the first boats but had no other choice except to stay on a sinking ship.

As well be in the little boats as aboard the ''Wotan,'' if another bomb went down.

I strained and squirmed in my manacles.

The sun arose; and in the clear light, I stared at the steel clamp binding my hands to the dummy wheel. Three numerals confronted me in tiny figures marked into the

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steel: 7—15—10. A series of figures ran round the bands of the three circlets of steel which formed the fastening of my clamps. It was a combination circlet lock. The numerals in the napkin leaped with full meaning from my mind: 18—35—21.

I could not twist my fingers far enough to touch the circlets but I could bend and catch them in my teeth. I had to straighten and see how far I had revolved each band; and after fixing the first at 18, I turned it away twice before I fixed also the second at 35; and the last was the hardest; but I got the three figures in line—and was free.

My hands were free, that was; but I could touch no control. They were in front of me in the pit for the pilot who had taken me into the air and had leaped. I unbuckled the straps over my shoulders—and Kinvarra saw me. He saw that my hands were free; but he still had control of the plane.

Instantly he flung me forward, throwing me into a dive with engine on full. His idea, when I surprised him, was to crash me at full speed into the sea. If he had thought, at that

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first second, to overturn me, he'd have flung me out; for I had thrown off the straps so I could climb into the forward pit. But he did not think, at once, about tipping me out; he thought of crashing me into the sea and so he gave me seconds to scramble into that forward pit and grab the controls.

I could feel, as I shut off the engine and pulled on the elevators, that too late he was trying something else; he was trying to overturn me. Under my hands I felt the tug of the radio effort. But it was no match for my muscles, I flattened my flight and was free.

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{{sc|He—Kinvarra,}} who had held me in his hand a half minute ago—was after me. He followed, firing, trying now to shoot me down; but I expected it and dodged him.

I cut to the right, confusing him by flying through the fleet which did not know that I was free.

The biplane from beside the ship was rising from the water with big bulges below its wings. These were not bombs nor bomb-shaped; they were cubes—steel boxes, undoubtedly, which had been carried in collapsed form and now were expanded to contain the cargo of loot. Jewels, they bore away and the platinum and a ton or two of the treasure of gold. But tons of bullion—actually tons by dead weight—remained aboard the ''Wotan;'' and a second biplane descended for its share.

It was the one which had laid the third frightful egg of TNT which, bursting, had

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swamped the little boats and swept the specks into the sea. A fourth bomb also it must have deposited. How or where it had exploded, or whether it had plunged harmlessly into the ocean, I did not know. I saw only that this biplane lacked both bombs; it, too, was become a cargo carrier descending, light, to take its tons of treasure.

I twinged to attack it; but it was no mark for me. It no longer dangled death over the specks on the sea. If I had a drum of machine-gun bullets to fire, I must spend them on the biplanes, with their eggs below them, swinging about and about on their beat over the ship.

I passed the cargo carrier and climbed with Kinvarra after me but not gaining upon me; my plane was swift as his.

I must try to attack, I knew, when the bombers reached an end of their orbit furthest from the ship. Attack? First I must escape attack; for a two-seater, with a machine-gun, flew at me.

It had detached itself from the flight of six machines which I had considered Bane's immediate command. I dodged, climbed and

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dived, zooming past a three-seater and next a single-seater.

I had only a flash of the face of the pilot but I knew it was she—she in a single seater! It meant—it must mean that Bane had brought her along as he had Pete and me.

I flew beyond the formation over the sinking ship and contours of other airplanes confronted me—contours familiar, contours of my comrades, navy contours! They were single-seater biplanes like my own and Pete's of three days ago in which we had flown to sea; but this was a combat patrol armed with machine-guns and arriving ready to fight.

They were only six; but it was clear that they flew with some realization of what was happening here. In attacking formation, they came; and I banked about, as I saw them.

Kinvarra, on my tail, fired through my wings; he made a pepper-pot top of the metal beside me. I could not get him in front of me but I pointed at and trained my machine-gun upon the two-seater; and fired. Then, at three angles we flew away from each other.

Overhead, the pursuit and combat planes

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of Bane's fleet moved to westward. The squadron mustered six machines, since Kinvarra and I had left it.

Three of the planes were piloted by men; three by automatons; or rather, two by wood figures and the third by Pete, held helpless as any effigy. No one had sent him, in a napkin, the key to the lock on his wrists.

The six machines were flying in pairs, in strange formation for combat—if you did not know their plan for the fight. They flew in fore-and-aft alignment, by pairs—in front a radio-controlled plane, in the rear the pilot. They flew fast and straight for the navy planes, offering frontal attack; and fast and straight, the six planes from the shore flew to accept it.

They had good view now of the sinking ship and of the little boats about it; they could see the bombers in the air above it; and they meant to waste no minute in manœuvering. If these pirate planes offered frontal attack, the navy would meet them. Plane would single out plane for duel direct to shoot down

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or be shot down in the first seconds of the fight. On they flew, pointed straight at each other.

In each airplane, a machine-gun was fixed which pointed with the airplane. It had no other aiming. You pointed your plane and fired; so you put your target directly before you; you flew at it, as you fired.

If you took time, you manœuvered, of course, to get behind your target, to put your self on his tail and shoot him down without enabling him to fire at you; but when you had no time, you flew at him, firing, and he, firing, flew at you.

You flew at each other with frightful speed, firing. Your first bullets were bound to miss; it would be the bullets fired last, when you were flying straight at each other and nearer by eight hundred feet each second, which would send one plane, or the other, down. That meant that the man who kept his nerve for a second longer than the other, would kill the fellow who faltered. These, as I knew while the squadrons dashed at each other, were the conditions of the fight; and I knew that

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of the six pirate planes, the three leaders had no nerves at all—they were automatons.

No; two were automatons; but the third was Pete!

I saw him in one of those three leading planes flung headlong into the fight. His control pilot, flying behind him, aimed him at the first of the oncoming navy planes; and the first of the navy planes aimed straight for him, head on at each other and firing, they flew; and I stared, sick at the sight.

Straight on, without faltering, the navy plane flew; some friend of mine, a classmate, the pilot! On, straight on for another split of a second; for he would not lose nerve first. On!

They crashed! It was head on, flying each at five miles the minute. For the navy man would not first swerve; and Pete's control sent him into the crash.

With my eyes, I followed them down; and falling and fluttering near them, dropped wings from another plane; a wingless fusilage shot into the sea. The survivors of the six

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whirled above me, fighting. I followed falls no longer. I was in the fight.

Two-seaters and three-seaters, armed with extra machine-guns and gunners, re-inforeced the blue monoplanes. Bane's command had moved up and was engaged. A navy plane plunged past me, trailing smoke. Another went into a tail-spin beside a falling doubleseater. I joined a navy plane and he or I shot down a blue single-seater—Donley, I thought.

By the reckoning that ran in my mind, there could be but three navy planes in the air. But I saw more than three. I realized that another squadron had arrived.

Below, the bombing biplanes had left the ship; they were seeking to escape with Bane's two- and three-seaters trying to fight a way clear for them. I joined an attack against the two-seaters and a three-seater which, I was sure, carried Bane—and controlled the automatic plane which bore Helen Lacey. I got close enough to see Bane fighting a machine-gun; I saw, then the three-seater shot down.

I flew for a blue monoplane on the edge of

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the fight which was climbing wildly with full throttle and pointed out to sea. To the other pilots, it appeared that I pursued a pirate plane which was attempting to escape; but I saw what it was—a blue monoplane without a machine gun which never had taken part in the fight. It was the radio-controlled seaplane in which Bane had brought her to see the show of his power. He was shot down; so it was flying wild, without control or possibility of control.

What had been his word to her on the lake? "You'll come back—if I do." So he had planned this, in his broken brain; so he had arranged to bring her back with him, if he was to return; if he was shot down—this.

He had left her flying with full throttle; for with full throttle I pursued and scarcely gained. I would not have overtaken her at all except that, having no control, she did not fly straight. She shot away in a series of zigzags which were caught and corrected only by mechanical balances and wind strains. Similarly she climbed and dropped, climbed and dropped again.
{{nop}}

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I came close to her. Clearly I could see her in her seat. She saw me and faced me, and her countenance might have been the effigy's; it had no expression at all. No fear for herself; none after what she had seen on the sea.

She gestured with her head in appeal to me not to help her, not to try to do anything for her. I was putting myself above her and she was forbidding me the madness of attempting a leap to her plane.

I did not try it. I left my seat but before I could crawl on a wing, we were separated. The business required another pilot in my plane and steady steering of hers. I dropped back into my pit and pursued and watched her. Watched, that was all I could do.

I shot ahead of her, far in front, with her falling behind me. I banked about, staring back and praying—for what already had happened.

Her engine had stalled. From failure of fuel, or whatever cause, her motor was stopped and she was slipping, without the frightful force of the airscrew to speed her, down to

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the ocean. She fell fluttering, with wings spread to the air currents and catching them like a dropping leaf. Down, down she went but not in the awful plunge of an airplane zooming with motor full on nor in the plummet drop of a plane with smashed wings. With her wings intact, and catching at the air, she went into the sea.

I found her under the wreck of her wings, floating with her face out of the water; and I felt, as my hands lifted her, a stir of life.

Her eyes did not open but as I worked at her to free her, she spoke to me. "Don't," she said. "Don't . . . take me out." Then she said, "You saw it? You see what I see?"

"The specks on the sea," I said.

{{" '}}The specks on the sea!{{' "}} And she spoke no other word during all the time I worked to free her, except once, "father". And she gave me no help at all; she did not want to be freed. But I had her out; I took her up in my arms and bore her to my pontoon. I stood holding her, dripping and cold and small. Her head drooped limp but she breathed; and her body was not broken.
{{nop}}

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I stood with her in my arms surrounded by quiet and calm. Silenced was the whirr of airscrews, motor-roars, shots and bombs—except as they rang in my ears. The sea lapped in little wavelets upon the pontoons; externally it was like the morning she had spoken to Pete and me on the sea.

She roused and shuddered from no shock or sound without her. Her dark lashes lifted from the chalk of her cheek and her grey eyes gazed aghast into the sky and searched it only to see it empty. Her eyes, then, came to me. "He's killed?" she whispered to me.

Bane was this he. "He must be."

She stared at me, trying to think. "Your—friend?" she next asked.

"It's all over for him."

She jerked in my arms. "The specks in the sea," she said and twisted.

To the west, whence we had flown, distant Vs lettered the sky, new squadrons standing sentinel over the sinking ship. The funnels of liners lay on the horizon where the ''Wotan'' had been.

A bow pointed for us and a steamer stopped

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with passengers pressed shoulder to shoulder at the rail as they stared at us. I was aseat upon my float holding her in my arms; throughout an hour, though she was conscious and had not slept, she had not spoken to me.

"A ship is here," I told her; and she asked, "You must take me aboard; can't you leave me here?"

They sent a boat for us and asked: "What happened to you?"

"Haven't you heard of the ''Wotan?"'' I said.

"Heard? Man; the ''Wotan's'' been bombed and sunk by airplanes! They bombed her boats, too! It was worse than the ''Titanic'' and the ''Lusitania.'' . ."

I hugged her to me, trying to stop her ears. So I took her aboard and gave her in charge of a physician.

The air was full of ''Wotan'' news. Two thousand passengers were missing. They had gone down with the ship or been in the boats which were bombed—the specks on the sea. Of the twenty airplanes in the raid, eleven had been shot down; of the nine, five had fled pursued and their final fate was yet to be known.

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Four only had escaped—one, the biplane which had dropped the first bombs and taken away two tons of treasure. Where it had flown with its diamonds and rubies and platinum and gold, no one knew—nor who would be the survivors to share the loot.

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{{sc|We were brought}} to a New York astounded and stunned; the wharves were lined, the streets swarmed with people awaiting the sorry ships bearing the rescued and the dead of the disaster.

Every now and then, in a strange, mass terror, they all looked up and searched the sky to see what there might be threatening them.

The newspapers bore broad, black edges and printed page after page of lists of the lost.

The alarm was on everyone's lips: "Is it just the start? What next?"

I was taken at once into conference with the Army and Navy Intelligence to whom I told, of course, all I knew. Helen was able, on that same day, to relate her experience.

In return I was told that the chateau and establishment at the lake in the mountains had been taken in charge. No one but servants had been found, except a man of fifty discovered locked in a room and dead. No sign of

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violence; heart-failure, apparently. They described him.

"Her father," I said; and they left it to me when to tell her.

Cawder, in Chicago, had escaped; his offices were cleared; no one was caught there; and from offices discovered to have been corresponding with him from Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, San Francisco and a half dozen other cities, everyone was fled. A radio warning early must have reached them.

The extent of their organization was stupendous.

I told Helen of her father, soon after I rejoined her; for she asked and asked of him. "Do you suppose he's heard of the ship? He'll not want to live."

"He never heard, I think," said I; and my news was small shock to her. "I hope it happened when they went away," said she. "He was to blame—he and I!"

At this, I caught her in my arms and pleaded with her. "Never say that again! You did nothing throughout it all, nothing but good. Even if you take upon yourself responsibility

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for your father's act, ''you'' did nothing but good!"

She tried to push herself free from me. "How can you say that?"

"Because it's true! It's true!" I cried and held her as though with my arms I could save her sanity. "Your father was responsible, at the worst, for no more than Bane."

"But he did it all; he led them!"

"In a premature, poorly planned raid which did little in comparison with what they might have done. Your madman Bane had to go ahead at once when Cawder would have waited for full preparation of a tremendous plan. So Bane destroyed one ship when Cawder would have struck with a great airfleet at the nation's greatest cities!

"And in what was done, you were always a check upon Bane; but for you, he would have been more merciless; and but for you, no warning would have gone to the navy airplanes. For Sally Gessler sent it to destroy Bane, and you, in her jealousy of you."

She quivered, small and lovely in my arms; and more quietly I held her against me as

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some of her agony, for her father's guilt, was gone.

"What does it all mean?" she questioned me, able for a moment to forget her personal place in it. "What does it all mean?"

I played with a lock of her hair and looked into her wide grey eyes and I touched the smoothness of her cheek.

"It may mean that at last," I said, "at last the day has come for the destruction which men have looked for and feared since someone first struck a spark from flint or rubbed together two dry sticks to start a fire. You find the day described, my dear," I said, "in the legends of every people, in one form or another. It goes far, far back before the beginning of history when the Gods, but not man, had fire.

"The Gods, you know, argued whether to give it to man; and most of them were against it. But one God, with an overtrust in man, gave it away; or in some stories, man stole it; and so started the creation of instruments which man had not the moral equipment to rightly control and which therefore destroy him.
{{nop}}

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"Doubt of man's ability to acquire the character of Gods as swiftly as he can acquire their powers, and dread of the certain consequences, runs on the tongue of every people."

"This means we've come to the day at last?"

I shook my head. "Not quite, I think—though never a race of men ever lived who have stolen as many material powers from the Gods as Americans. Beyond any doubt, the day can come. But I won't have it yet—please."

My hand again was at her hair.

"Nor I," she whispered.

"For first, we want to live, you and I, don't we?"

"Yes; I do want to live."/last/

"And love?"

"Yes; and love. For I do love; I love you."

{{c|{{larger|{{uc|'''The end.'''}}}}}}

—

—cov

User:SnowyCinema/P/Flying Death (Balmer)

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