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 "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.

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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?"

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 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

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Page:A Complete System of Christian Theology (Wakefield, 1869, completesystemof0000wake).pdf/16

10 Theology, in its

When we say

These two essential

Thus far we

It follows, therefore, that religion

As theology consists in a systematic arrangement of the general


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 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,

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 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;

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 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.

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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

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 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,

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 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,

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 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.

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 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

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 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.

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 "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

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 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

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 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.

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 "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.

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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.

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 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.

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 "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.

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Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalof404219041905roya).pdf/411

{| style="margin:auto;" ! style="text-align:center;" | English. ! style="text-align:center;" | Chinese. ! style="text-align:center;" | Characters. ! style="text-align:center;" | Remarks.
 * 4. Chenong
 * Chin-long
 * 賤籠
 * 5. Chindras
 * Chin-ya-la
 * 賤也嗱
 * 6. Gemencheh
 * Nga-man-che
 * 雅文姐
 * 7. Jeram
 * Yit-lam
 * 熱林
 * 8. Kampong Batu
 * Kam-pong Pa-tu
 * 金榜把都
 * 9. Kendong
 * Kan-tung
 * 根洞
 * 10. Keru
 * Ka-lu
 * 加路
 * 11. Kuala Gemas
 * Kua-la kam-bu
 * 掛嗱禁武
 * 12. Kundor
 * Kin-chung
 * 見鐘
 * 13. Linggi
 * Lin-ngi
 * 鄰宜
 * 14. Lobok China
 * Lo-mok chin-na
 * 羅莫賤嗱
 * 15. Makunyit
 * Ma-ku-yit
 * 嗎古熱
 * 16. Mantai
 * Man-thai
 * 文梯
 * 17. Pedas
 * Mun-ta
 * 門咑
 * 18. Pengkalan Durian
 * Peng-ka-lan lo-lin
 * 兵架蘭老連
 * }
 * 13. Linggi
 * Lin-ngi
 * 鄰宜
 * 14. Lobok China
 * Lo-mok chin-na
 * 羅莫賤嗱
 * 15. Makunyit
 * Ma-ku-yit
 * 嗎古熱
 * 16. Mantai
 * Man-thai
 * 文梯
 * 17. Pedas
 * Mun-ta
 * 門咑
 * 18. Pengkalan Durian
 * Peng-ka-lan lo-lin
 * 兵架蘭老連
 * }
 * 17. Pedas
 * Mun-ta
 * 門咑
 * 18. Pengkalan Durian
 * Peng-ka-lan lo-lin
 * 兵架蘭老連
 * }
 * Peng-ka-lan lo-lin
 * 兵架蘭老連
 * }
 * }


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 "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."

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 "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.

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 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.

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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

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 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.

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 "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

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 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

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 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!"

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 been made for H.M.S. Victorious if those Fallabar engines could have been sent to Chatham dockyard, would mention that "you could not get any pace up on her;" and all who knew her sadly owned "she wouldn't steer," so naturally she spent the greater part of her time on the Ogowé on a sand bank, or in the bush. All West African steamers have a mania for bush, and the delusion that they are required to climb trees. The Fallabar had the complaint severely, because of her defective steering powers, and the temptation the magnificent forest, and the rapid currents, and the sharp turns of the creek district, offered her; she failed, of course—they all fail—but it is not for want of practice. I have seen many West Coast vessels up trees, but never more than fifteen feet or so.

The trade of this lower part of the Ogowé, from the mouth to Lembarene, a matter of 130 miles, is almost nil. Above Lembarene, you are in touch with the rubber and ivory trade.

This Fallabar creek is noted for mosquitoes, and the black passengers made great and showy preparations in the evening time to receive their onslaught, by tying up their strong chintz mosquito bars to the stanchions and the cook-house. Their arrangements being constantly interrupted by the white engineer making alarums and excursions amongst them; because when too many of them get on one side the Mové takes a list and burns her boilers. Conversation and atmosphere are full of mosquitoes. The decision of widely experienced sufferers amongst us is, that next to the lower Ogowé, New Orleans is the worst place for them in this world.

The day closed with a magnificent dramatic beauty. Dead ahead of us, up through a bank of dun-coloured mist rose the moon, a great orb of crimson, spreading down the oil-like, still river, a streak of blood-red reflection. Right astern, the sun sank down into the mist, a vaster orb of crimson, and when he had gone out of view, sent up flushes of amethyst, gold, carmine and serpent-green, before he left the moon in undisputed possession of the black purple sky.


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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.

"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."

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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 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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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.

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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?"

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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."

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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.

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 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."

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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.

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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.

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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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 * 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?"

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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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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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 Forest and river were absolutely silent, but there was apleasant chatter and laughter from the black crew and passengers away forward, that made the Mové seem an island of life in a land of death. I retired into my cabin, so as to get under the mosquito curtains to write; and one by one I heard my companions come into the saloon adjacent, and say to the watchman: "You sabe six o'clock? When them long arm catch them place, and them short arm catch them place, you call me in the morning time." Exit from saloon—silence—then: "You sabe five o'clock? When them long arm catch them place, and them short arm catch them place, you call me in the morning time." Exit—silence—then "You sabe half-past five o'clock? When them long arm—" Oh, if I were a watchman! Anyhow, that five o'clocker will have the whole ship's company roused in the morning time.

June 7th.—Every one called in the morning time by the reflex row from the rousing of the five o'clocker. Glorious morning. The scene the reversal of that of last night. The forest to the east shows a deep blue-purple, mounted on a background that changes as you watch it from daffodil and amethyst to rose-pink, as the sun comes up through the night mists. The moon sinks down among them, her pale face flushing crimson as she goes; and the yellow-gold sunshine comes, glorifying the forest and gilding the great sweep of tufted papyrus growing alongside the bank; and the mist vanishes, little white flecks of it lingering among the water reeds and lying in the dark shadows of the forest stems. The air is full of the long, soft, rich notes of the plaintive warblers, and the uproar consequent upon the Mové taking on fuel wood, which comes alongside in canoe loads from the Fallabar.

Père Steinitz and Mr. Woods are busy preparing their respective canoes for their run to Fernan Vaz through the creek. Their canoes are very fine ones, with a remarkably clean run aft. The Père's is quite the travelling canoe, with a little stage of bamboo aft, covered with a hood of palm thatch, under which you can make yourself quite comfortable, and keep yourself and your possessions dry, unless something desperate comes on in the way of rain.

By 10.25 we have got all our wood aboard, and run off up


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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."

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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.

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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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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!"

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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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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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