THAT WHICH HATH WINGS (continued 5)

Sherbrand said, drawing off his left glove and showing blood oozing from under bluish-looking finger-nails:

"I found it uncommonly parky to-day at 10,000 feet. There was a nor'-east breeze, a regular piercer. Found myself spitting blood rather badly, and to be candid, I was uncommonly grateful that the French Consul declined my offer, in case he was not satisfied, to do the thing again. The fact is, the operation, slight as it was, has weakened me a little. I wouldn't care to repeat the performance without a good night's rest to buck me up."

Von Herrnung shrugged and agreed:

"That it is cold at 10,000 I can credit easily. I have had the oil in my own gauges frozen at 7,000 in midsummer. Da ist nicht zit strassen. Hæmorrhage and dizziness are the chief enemies of the aviator. One's stomach betrays one also, the cursed beast!—after a good hearty meal!"

"I don't give mine the chance!" Sherbrand returned, "but stave off the pangs of appetite with milk-tablets and meat-lozenges. Do all my flying on these and chocolate. Keep a little store of the things and a Thermos of hot coffee, in a cache I've made for them, under the map-desk on the left of the instrument-frame, facing the pilot's seat. If you will come over to the Bird I'll show you, and explain the working of the gyroscopic hoverer." He added, looking squarely at von Herrnung: "Of course the cutting of the double screw is the chief thing about the invention. I've registered every way I know and got a trade-mark. They tell me at the Patent Office that my international rights are secure!"

"They should be, if you have those precautions taken. It does not do to trust," said von Herrnung, "too much! The monkey proverb is law for most men." He shrugged. "It comes, by the way, from Namaland in German South-West Africa. 'Nuts in your pouch are nuts in mine!'"

The freemasonry of their calling had established a degree of friendliness between them. They were laughing over the monkey's philosophy as they went over together to the Bird. The small boy who had been idly sprawling on the hot turf near them, with his tilted hat shielding his face from the westering sun-rays, got up and trotted after them like a collie pup.

"Coming too, young man?" Sherbrand said, glancing back and smiling. The boy nodded in answer, and thence-forward kept close at the heels of the men, his ears industriously drinking in their conversation, while his eyes were glued on the brown leather satchel depending from the German's gloved left hand. Both men, now leaning over the side of the pilot's cockpit, examined the gearing of the hoverer, protected by a transparent casing set in the tough ash, copper-riveted planking of the fuselage. Then with the aid of sulky Davis they tilted the Bird, and inspected the pair of thin circular plates of toughened steel with flanged edges that, revolving at high velocity in different. directions, constituted the horizontal screw.

"Driven from the engine, as you see, by an endless chain-drive arrangement. By manipulation of levers, you can throw the tractor out of gear, and hover, under favourable circumstances and in still weather, by means of the horizontal screw alone. But as a rule you keep the tractor working, and the screw acts in one as a lifter and floating-anchor. That's about all it amounts to!—I've said I don't pretend to hang immovable in the air like the albatross and the condor, not to mention the gull and sparrow-hawk and dragon-fly! While I hover I am making way—but way to an inappreciable amount. One of these days we shall find out the big Secret of Stability. Until then we must rub along as best we can!"

Von Herrnung returned:

"I am hellishly interested in your invention. It now occurs to me that as you happen to know my flying record"—he shrugged his great shoulders and smoothed his tight red roll of moustache with a well-manicured finger-tip—"that it is possible you would have sufficient confidence to allow me to test your gyroscopic hoverer myself?" He laughed again pleasantly as he finished: "Whatever else I may do, I give you my word of honour I shall not pile up your machine. Will you consent? It may lead—supposing you do not close with the French offer—to big business—done with my friends!"

Sherbrand had looked doubtful, only for an instant. Before the twelve-year-old eavesdropper had recovered from the shock that had set his brain spinning and his heart thumping, the situation had been accepted by the owner of the Bird of War. He held out his left hand, and von Herrnung gripped and wrenched it, noting with inward amusement that his grip had brought fresh lines of blood creeping about the edges of Sherbrand's finger-nails.

"You shake hands with the left," he commented, smiling. "Not for the first time have I noticed the peculiarity in Englishmen of the younger breed."

"It is a custom," Sherbrand answered, "with—members of an organisation to which I had, and still have, the honour to belong."

His eyes, in speaking, went to the bright-haired boy in Scout's uniform standing near them, but von Herrnung's glance had not followed his. The boy was staring wistfully at the round-faced clock on the front gable of the café restaurant—ten minutes to the half-hour and no sign of the Chief's returning. Bawne's courage began to ooze away at the ends of his fingers and toes.

"Then," von Herrnung was beginning impatiently, when a sallow, undersized young man, whose hollow chest and inky paper cuffs advertised his clerical employment, came up, touched a pen sticking out from behind his ear, and said as Sherbrand turned to him:

"Beg pardon, sir, but the telegraph-cabin is locked up proper, and Mr. Macrombie 'as carried orf the key."

"Out of sorts to-day, is he?" Sherbrand asked meaningly, and the telegraph-clerk answered:

"I've never seen 'im so bad before—in the middle of the month!"

As Fate would have it, Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer Telegraphist of the R.N.—from whose sleeve the golden Crown and thunderbolt had been reft by reason of his anti-teetotal habits, had received a visit that morning from a friend who had repaid a debt. Hence the licensed operator of Fanshaw's experimental and educational Wireless-station had succumbed to an attack of his intermittent complaint.

Hear Macrombie's assistant continuing the recital:

"He's left the aërial connected to the transmitter and gone out for lemon-squashes four times since one o'clock grub. 'That's the drink for men who have souls to save, ye little fag-eater!' he says to me; 'Salvation for soul and body, sucked through a straw! If thae deboshed and hopeless drunkards at the Admiralty could be induced to swear off their cursed alcohol and take to it, I wad no longer be deaved to the point of steeping my tongue in profanity, by the kind o' eediots' gibberish that is yammering at my lugs!'"

"He'd been raking a lot of Admiralty strays in?" Sherbrand queried. Von Herrnung, who had been grinding his heel into the turf and gnawing his lip with ill-concealed impatience, turned his head sharply, and listened to the colloquy with all his ears.

"Not so much X's as definites, sir," responded Macrombie's assistant. "He was upset about ten minutes before he broke out by getting an 'Urgent' without a Preparative Call. Then comes 'Important' in International Code, and 'Administration' and 'Emergency.' Then 'War Office,' and 'Documents,' and 'Enforcement of the Law.' By that time 'e was purple in the face and 'arf crazy. 'If I had my way wi' you, ye bung-nosed intemperates,' he says, groaning-like—'I wad keep ye on grits an' caller watter for a fortnicht! Oh, that men, as auld Hosea says in the inspired Screeptures'—an' I 'appen to know myself it was Shakespeare—'should pit an enemy intil their mooths to steal awa' their brains!' An' 'e snatches off the telephone 'ead-band and chucks it into the corner, and just as my own instrument starts to tick out a call, he ketches me by the neck as if I'd bin a tame rabbit, an' slings me out o' the office an' locks the door. 'Out o' this!' 'e says, puttin' the cabin key in 'is pocket. 'I will no' have your lugs, dirr-ty as they are, polluted by the unclean counsels o' the wicked. I'm awa' to cool the wrath o' the righteous wi' anither lemon squash!' An' the winder is blocked by the Morse key instrument, an' even if it wasn't, it's too small for me to get in through!" Macrombie's victim ended, with an injured sniff.

"Well, well! Better hang about the cabin a bit and possess your soul in patience. If any pupils drop along, tell them they'll have to wait! Perhaps Macrombie'll turn up sober enough to take them on by-and-by. As for the message in transmission, I daresay it will keep. Mr. Fanshaw's not expecting any particularly important communication that I know of. Oh, hang it!" Sherbrand whistled dismally. "I'd forgotten. That's just what I am!"

"Shall I go and see if I can find Rumball?" suggested Macrombie's assistant helpfully. "He's at the engine-sheds. He's been a locksmith. 'Twouldn't take him more than a sec. to open the office door!"

"Cut then!" acceded Sherbrand, and the telegraph-clerk touched his pen—discovering by a jab of the inky nib that he was wearing it—and set off at a trot in the direction of the engine-sheds.

You are to suppose that von Herrnung's sharp ears had gathered the pith of the communication. Some meaning in the isolated words the clerk had repeated had had a palpable effect upon his nerves. His face looked bluish-grey and streaky, as he said to Sherbrand, stammering in his eagerness:

"So then, it is agreed about my flying your machine?"

"I see no objection."

"Gut!" Von Herrnung went on, concealing a huge joy under a careless camaraderie: "Can you lend me a cap and coat and a pair of Schulzbrille? Goggles you call them, yes! The coat should better to be a large one"—he stumbled in his English now through sheer excitement—"I am so much a bigger man than you!"

"Certainly. We keep Flying rigs in all manner of sizes. It's in the way of business," Sherbrand said. Then his glance fell upon Davis, whose little black-avised countenance wore an expression of sulky resentment, and he uttered a slight exclamation. "I forgot, Davis! I really am very sorry!" He turned to von Herrnung and explained in a tone of finality that enraged the hearer: "This is Davis's afternoon off. I cannot ask him to repeat the climb."

"It is hellishly annoying! But see! Listen, my fellow!" He addressed himself to little grimy Davis, unhelmeted and unbuttoned, leaning against the Bird's flank with his hands in the pockets of his oily overalls, chewing a blade of grass; "You will go up with me if I tip you? A sovereign! Come then! The gold does it! You will go up with me, will you not, yes?"

Davis spat out grass and delivered himself:

"Not even for my young guv'nor—and a Bank of England finnup, do I do the soaring heagle hact again this blooming Wednesday."

Welsh Davis had come to London from a mountain farm in Merioneth, speaking nothing but his native Cymric, and had culled his Sassenach from Cockney lips. Von Herrnung bid another sovereign, and then two more, ineffectually.

"Naow!" Davis was rock. "I've done my day's stunt an' I'm nuffy. D'yer tumble? Nuffy! Yer knaows wot that means—if you're a Flying Bloke!"

"Damn you, I will gif you ten pounds!" Von Herrnung's face was wrung and streaked with passion. He breathed hard, and the brown leather satchel jumped and wobbled in his shaking hand.

"It isn't any use," said Sherbrand, "really! Money doesn't count with Davis where his off-time's concerned. Davis doesn't want to go up again, and I've not another man of his weight available. What do you turn the scale at? I should guess 16 stone or thereabouts?"

"I weigh 16 st. 8 lbs. in my ordinary clothes."

"Well, I tot 11 st. 6 lbs. in the fullest of flying-rig, and Davis only 8 st. 5 lbs. And the Bird is built to carry in addition to her engine—what with the instruments, so forth, and man-freight, a cargo of something like 22 stone. You see, even with Davis, you'd load the machine a good bit over her"—he smiled at the conceit—"her Plimsoll mark. Again, I'm sorry. It's your luck! No flying for you to-day!"

"It is damnably annoying! But"—von Herrnung's red-lashed blue eyes were busily scanning Bawne's face and figure—"but suppose I could get a boy of 6 stone to go up with me? Merely as ballast, for I do not require an assistant—the difficulty might be got over in this way? What you say, my little English fellow?" He turned on the boy with a great air of jovial patronage. "Are you plucky enough? Shall we go for a voyage together in the sky?"

"Yes—please!"

The dark blue eyes met the hard light ones bravely, though every vestige of colour had sunk out of the young face. Then back to lips and cheeks the banished colour came racing. Bawne flushed crimson, as von Herrnung held up a bright bit of gold, and sharply shook his head.

"Was? Will you not take the sovereign?" von Herrnung demanded. "Are you a faint-heart after all?"

The boy bit his lip and said, clenching his small fists desperately:

"It's against the rule for Scouts to take tips. So I don't want the money. But I'm ready to come with you!"

"Look here, old fellow!" Sherbrand was beginning anxiously. The boy stopped him with:

"Really and truly I'm not funky—and you said I was to have another flight."

"So I did, and so you shall," agreed Sherbrand. "But this won't be just a 'bus trip around the aërodrome. It will be climbing and spiralling and hovering, and all the rest!"

Bawne persisted:

"You could strap me in. And I'm not afraid—really!"

"And," von Herrnung interposed, "I shall not ascend higher than three thousand. Probably less will do for my purpose. The boy will be quite safe. Surely you are able to trust him with me?"

Sherbrand hesitated, then said to Bawne in a relieved tone: "Well, there's the Doctor talking to a tall lady in white with a hat that glitters. Run across to your father and ask him whether you may go?"

"I'd rather you asked him—if you must—and let me stop here!"

"Gut! Sehr gut!" Von Herrnung's tautened nerves would have been relieved by some hard Prussian swearing. He jangled out a laugh instead. He caught hold of the boy under the armpits and lifted him high above his head. "What is your weight? Six stone? Come now, have I not guessed nearly!" He had not relinquished his grip on the leather satchel, and as it banged against his ribs, Bawne realised that it was quite light.

"Papers inside!" he said to himself. Something quite hard was under the leather at the corners, perhaps the thinnest of metal plates. Its contact with the boy's body seemed to sober von Herrnung's exultation. He dropped Bawne unceremoniously, and straightened himself again.

"How much petrol has been used?" he asked hastily of Davis, going over to the Bird and mounting on the landing-carriage to look at the gauges. "Because when I fly I never take risks. You will have to fill up the tank again. Do you hear, my fellow?"

"If Mr. Sherbrand orders me," Davis spat out another piece of grass, "dessay I shall do it!" He eyed von Herrnung with surly disapproval as he craned over the Bird's fuselage, while audibly commenting to an acquaintance who had strolled up:

"Sheer blinders, I call 'em, these ere Fritzies! Walk into Buckingham Pallis next minute and ask to look into the Privy Puss. 'Ope the Governor comes back before 'e gits Nosey Parkerin' into the 'orizontal 'overing gear! Perish me if I ever met a bloke with such a nerve! Watto, old sonny?" He addressed himself to the boy. "Ain't you feelin' up to the posh?"

"I am quite all right, thank you!" Bawne responded, while his heart bumped against his ribs. In his brain words and sentences kept forming:

"I'm only a little chap. And this is—a Big thing! Bigger than the Chief expected, perhaps! And he said he'd be back in half an hour." Half an hour meant thirty minutes. He glanced at the big round white-faced clock above the entrance of the café restaurant. More than fifteen minutes of the half-hour had gone.

To stick to the big, brutal German was his—Bawne's—Secret Mission. And the inspiring, uplifting voice that thousands of boy-hearts thrill to all the big world over had said to him:

"Quit yourself like a man!"

CHAPTER XXX

THE REAPING

To Patrine, when the shadow of the familiar figure of the Doctor mingled with hers upon the dry green grass, and Saxham's voice called her by her name, it was as though his presence had a weight that physically oppressed her, and his scrutiny seared her flesh like the approach of white-hot iron.

Through her mind passed swift sentences: "Yet another of us has disgraced him! My father and mother are not the only traitors of our name!" In the rawness of her mental anguish every sense was unnaturally exaggerated. The ticking of Saxham's watch, that the furious beating of her heart could not drown, tormented by its iteration. And worst of all, was the consciousness of defilement in the physical sense.

"Did not your mother give you my message?"

Always pale, her pallor did not demand particular attention, save that under their ruddy salve the edges of her lips showed white. She answered, forcing the lips to smile, compelling her eyes to meet Saxham's.

"About coming to see you?" She remembered and drew from her gilt-chain vanity bag the letter she had not posted: "This was written to you to-day. Then I thought I would have been able to look in at Harley Street, and in the end——"

"In the end you neither paid the visit nor posted the excuse. Well, be more considerate in future to those who love you. Sincere, clean love does not grow on every gooseberry bush, my dear!"

The curt speech, made in the Doctor's brusquest tone, conveyed to Patrine an impression of exquisite kindness. So many boons, so many benefits had been conferred in that grim, curt way. She had wept and would not weep again, but her hard bright eyes grew misty as she thanked him, and asked after Lynette, with a touch of wistfulness that recalled to the Doctor that unforgettable time when greedy Death had threatened to rob him of his joy. He answered her cheerfully, and they found themselves chatting of familiar, everyday matters across the gulf that yawned between. And then, warned by some swift change of expression in her face, Saxham glanced up to see Sherbrand approaching.

"Doctor!" he called. "Sorry to interrupt, but would you listen a minute?"

The tall, lightly-built, lightly moving figure came swinging towards them. He still carried the eared cap with the goggled visor, his thick, silvery-blonde hair was darkened at the temples with the dampness generated under the close covering of waterproof. His light grey-blue eyes were smiling, yet there was a pucker of anxiety between his eyebrows, as he put von Herrnung's case.

"So," he ended, "instead of taking a second flight in the Bird with me as we arranged, would you trust your boy to this foreign crack who's in a hole for a passenger? He is Captain von Herrnung of the German Flying Service—winner of the two-days' flight from Hanover to Paris in April—a famous run!" He added, "I need hardly say that with such a record as von Herrnung holds you cannot be apprehensive of any rashness or neglect on his part. But I'll own I would rather take Bawne up another day myself. Still, von Herrnung——"

"I am aware of the reputation held by the person you mention. I am going now to speak to him."

The Doctor's face was devoid of all expression. But he battled, as he spoke, with a masterful desire to forbid Bawne the expedition. To assert parental authority on this point would have been the mode of dealing approved by one of the two men who dwelt within the Dop Doctor. The other Saxham said "Hold!"

Dare you place your paternal love, that other Saxham asked—between your son and his duty? Because it would be so easy to do it, is the reason why you should refrain! The Doctor had walked a few paces towards the object of his troubled reflections. He wheeled abruptly, returned, and presented Sherbrand to his niece.

A faint blush rose in Patrine's white cheeks as her eyes met those of the tall young aviator. They looked at her without any sign of recognition, and the conviction, "He has forgotten!" shot stingingly across her mind. "He did not think me worth remembering" came next. And then she could have laughed, recalling that she had dismissed him from her own thoughts on the discovery of his connection with Fanshaw's. She had made so certain that a teacher of Flying couldn't be a gentleman.

Now, face to face with him again, in his upright easy bearing, in his straight and fearless regard, in the pleasant well-bred voice that addressed her in a brief conventional sentence or so, she read his patent of gentlehood.

From whatever root it sprang, the flower was noble. Her swift eyes shot a glance at the bigger figure in grey. What a hoggish knight of the dunghill, what a high-born clown had she not distinguished by her choice and selection. The smile of scorn that curved her mouth was suddenly banished by the sudden recollection of Bawne.

"Uncle Owen, you have not yet told Mr. Sherbrand whether Bawne may go up again or not. I am sure—if you won't think me—if you don't mind my saying so!—that he has had enough for to-day! I think it would be better if you would not——"

It was not the deep warm voice of Patrine's characteristic utterance, but a weaker, thinner voice that hesitated and faltered and trailed away. It recalled nothing to Sherbrand. He looked at her and transferred his gaze to Saxham, who asked:

"Does this German officer intend climbing to any high altitude, or perpetrating anything in the nature of a display?"

Sherbrand explained:

"He does not want to go higher than three thousand. Just to try the hoverer, regarding which some business friends of his are bitten with curiosity. My mechanic is not able to go up with him, and he wants a light-weight passenger. He is over sixteen stone himself, and the Bird has been built to carry me with Davis. I calculated her wing-area to——"

Sherbrand travelled into the realm of technicalities, using terms that were Volapuk and Esperanto to Patrine. He had supple, finely-shaped hands, and used them as he talked with vivid illustrative gestures.

"So," he ended, "as your plucky youngster asked to go, it seemed a way out of the difficulty, provided you weren't dead against the thing. Of course we'll swadd the little chap in a sweater or so under the pneumatic jacket. It'll be a bit parky, even at three thousand, now the sun's beginning to down."

He added:

"I'll see to the strapping myself. You may rely upon it, Doctor."

Saxham said with a look of kindness at the handsome face with the clear candid eyes:

"I am sure of that!" He added, mastering that inward impulse: "I shall not forbid the flight if Bawne is set on it. But first, I must speak to him!"

And the great form with the stern thoughtful face and scholar's stoop moved across the greensward, followed by the tall young figures of Sherbrand and Patrine. Of the two, the man was by a bare inch the taller. This Patrine realised in a swift side-glance. Certain featural characteristics of him, personal impressions received half-unconsciously, retained their clear sharpness then and for many days....

The silvery-yellow hair toning into the pale brown skin. The powerful sweep of the brows over eyes set flush with their large orbits, prominent, brilliant, mobile as the eyes of a bird of flight. The nose, arched and jutting like a kite's beak, with large sensitive nostrils, the somewhat sunken cheek and the sharply-angled jaw, the little ear and the rounded skull superbly set upon the full muscular neck rising out of the collar of the gabardine, made up a portrait upon which some happy woman might well dote and dream.

It was five o'clock and the breeze that smelt of heather and clover-hay and strawberries blew more strongly, straight from under the westering sun. Patrine drank in deep draughts of the buoyant sweetness. The leaden gyves had fallen from her limbs, the leaden weight had lifted from her bosom. She had recovered something of her old, elastic grace of movement, that even the sheath-skirt could not spoil. Looking at her, Sherbrand said to himself:

"She walks like a Highland hill-woman or a native girl of the Philippines. And—did Heaven or a Bond Street specialist give her that extraordinary hair? I rather hate it, and yet I have to go on looking at it. Does she know? I wonder if she knows?"

She felt his eyes on her. And the buoyant sense of well-being that his presence brought to her was mingled with an agony of apprehension. Her heart clamoured, like a brooding thrush attacked by the owl, that Bawne should not be permitted to risk himself with von Herrnung. "Does any other living being know him as I know him?" she asked herself. "If by some misadventure it came to a question of one life or the other, would he scruple—no! he would not scruple for an instant to sacrifice the child?"

Three words to Uncle Owen—if one only dared to speak them—would have put the thing out of the question. But at the thought of the dreadful avowal to which such an utterance might lead, Patrine was stricken dumb. She could not face the music. This was one little ear of wild oats out of the full field that waited for her reaping, sown in the hours that lie between the midnight of pleasure and the dawn of the Day of Remorse.

Perhaps she and Sherbrand had walked more slowly than it had seemed to her. She saw Saxham and his son meet, heard, indistinctly the exchange of a few brief sentences, and then the boy, with a jump to hug his father round the neck, ran to her as she came up.

"Cousin Pat, I'm going to get into my flying-kit in a minute." His heart was thumping so that it shook him, and the short upper lip with the gold-brown dust of freckles on it quivered, hard as he tried to keep it stiff: "One doesn't do it before people generally—but I'd rather like you to kiss me now!"

"My precious, a dozen times!"

She said it impetuously in the deep womanly baritone that Bawne loved, and Sherbrand started as he heard it. She dropped her tall-sticked sunshade, and caught the little boyish figure to her broad womanly bosom, hugged him until he panted, and kissed his pale cheeks red. You do not need to be reminded that Patrine was a galumpher. "Don't go! don't go!" she whispered in her darling's neck. "I hate your going! and I don't believe Uncle Owen likes it.... Say you've been up once and you're 'nuffy! Pretend you funk it. Do, for my sake!"

"I—can't. Ouch! You tickle! Please let me go. This is business!" He squirmed, and she burst out laughing, and released him. The act was a wrench that tore her bleeding heart anew.

He bounded instantly after Sherbrand, seeing him go forward to join von Herrnung, who was standing watching Davis fill the Bird's tank with petrol, and her reservoir with oil.

There was no spurring these lazy devils of English into movement.... The accursed pig-dogs, the stupid sheep's heads! If that fragmentary Wireless message had really to do with the business, within the next ten minutes everything might be ruined. One walked perilously, as amongst pebbles, holding a watch-glass of High Explosive in one's hand. Here came the man and the boy. He joined them with a noisy burst of forced laughter. Presently you saw all three moving in the direction of a building where the "flying-kits of all sorts and shapes and sizes," of which Sherbrand had boasted, were kept for the use of the patrons of Fanshaw's School. As they went in, Bawne cast a wistful glance up at the clock on the front gable of the café restaurant, now supplying afternoon tea served in brown teapots, and rolls and butter on thick white platters, to a thin sprinkling of customers.

"Three minutes to the half-hour," said the clock.

Would the Chief come, or must this thing be carried out by a small boy whose heart lay, a palpable lump of cold lead in the pit of his stomach, and whose knees were turning to jelly as he went?

If Cousin Pat, when she begged him not to go, had known how badly he, Bawne, had wanted to hold her round the neck and beg her not to let him, he would at this moment have been unheroically safe.

She was so big. He had most dreadfully wanted to cling to her and cry—imagine a fellow of twelve doing anything so kiddish. But he had swallowed the unmanly tears, and wriggled out of her strong protecting arms.

He looked back and saw her tall white figure, standing near the hulking black-clad shape of the Doctor, who had pulled his hat-brim low down over his eyes, and did not seem to be talking or laughing at all. Davis was doing something with a spanner to the Bird's under-carriage, and the long, thin shadow of her in combination with the squat shadow of the little stooping Welshman, stretched eastwards over the dry green grass.

He heaved a big sigh and followed his man in. Von Herrnung was already trying on pneumatic coats, swearing in nervous German when they were not big enough. At last he was caparisoned, in a heavy suit of flannel-lined Carberrys and a buttonless hooded jacket. He had stripped the burst glove from his wounded hand, thrown it away, and replaced the magpie pearl ring upon his little finger. He had put on a woollen helmet and tied over that a flapped cap with goggles and ear-pieces. While he attended to his outfit, the leather satchel lay at his feet, or sometimes between them, or he would keep a boot-toe on a corner of it. And his hard blue eyes were vigilantly watchful against surprise.

Sherbrand and the dresser—who presided over a long room of shelves and pegs laden with queer garments, and who looked like a washed mechanic in spotless blue overalls—put Bawne into a woollen sweater, and added to the panoply he had worn already that morning, and which consisted of leggings, slip-strapped to a webbing waistbelt, a pneumatic jacket, a knitted helmet such as von Herrnung wore, and a pair of goggles. They looked like the Eskimo hunter and his little boy in the "Book of The Arctic"—a volume specially beloved of Saxham's small son.

It was five minutes past the half-hour when they emerged from the dressing-shed. Saxham came to meet them, turned and walked by his son's side. Davis, whose weakness as regards the sex we know, had pinched from the visitor's enclosure a green-painted iron chair for Patrine. She half-rose, stung by an impulse of escape, when she saw von Herrnung approaching, and then controlled herself and sat down again.

Nothing escaped her long eyes. They saw Sherbrand glance from Saxham to von Herrnung, and read the intention of an introduction in his look. He had just begun:

"Doctor, I don't think you have met Captain——" when von Herrnung lengthened his long stride, outstripped his companions, and went over swiftly and stood beside Patrine.

CHAPTER XXXI

VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK

She knew that he had interpreted her movement as an invitation.

He saluted her and said, speaking thickly:

"It is necessary that I have a word with you. Walk with me for one moment. I shall not keep you more!"

He bulked huge in his rig-out, but looked thoroughly at home, and deadly workmanlike. He pushed up his goggles as though conscious that they discounted his personal attractions, and his blue eyes were stony and glittering, and his full mouth showed pale and hard-set under the scarlet roll of his moustache.

"I shall not see you again to-day, and I have something important to tell you." He spoke rapidly and his breathing was harsh and loud. "I have been recalled by my Chiefs and return to Germany in—another two or three days. That we do not meet again before I leave is possible, therefore I wish to give you my address."

She did not look up. A white hand with red hairs growing thick on the back of it offered her a pencilled card. She made no movement to take it. He said, thrusting the card underneath her eyes:

"It is printed here in German letters. You read and speak my language badly, so I will translate for you—'Squadron-Captain-Pilot Count Theodor von Herrnung, Imperial Field Flying Service, Flight Station XXX., Taubefeld, near Diebrich, West Hessen, Germany.' Write your letter to me in English. The address copy from this. Will you not take the card?"

"There is no need to. I do not mean to write to you!"

"Danke. You are candid," he said, "at least. You give me to understand that whatever happens—" he repeated the words with a singular inflection "whatever happens!—you will have no more to do with me?"

"Have I not told you so twice already?"

He gritted his teeth and said, controlling furious anger:

"Erklären Sie! Was giebt es? Why are you so—rottenly furious with me? You have yourself to thank for—what has happened! You led me on. You made me crazy about you. And the devil of it is I am so still! The sight of you maddens me! Listen! Do not be stupid—unkind to yourself and to me! In three days from now, you will get an envelope at your Club with plenty of money. Join me at my headquarters at Taubefeld and then—you will see! We will be happy—you shall have plenty of money to throw about when we visit Berlin and other big cities, and jewels, dresses, pleasure, admiration—everything a beautiful woman wants! Grosse Gott! Can I offer anything more tempting? What are you saying? 'Yes!' or 'No!'"

Her narrowed eyes looked like long black slits in her white face. The pale lips barely moved to answer:

"Neither! Are you proposing to marry me?"

He laughed woodenly, and repeated:

"Marry you! Ha, ha! What verdammt nonsense are you talking? What has love to do with getting married? Nothing that I have ever heard! Of course I shall marry—my family have arranged all that for me. But my Countess will not interfere with my mistress—that I promise you! Come, be kind, my beautiful Isis! Whisper now that you agree!"

He bent his head to hear. The whisper came from the pale lips:

"I will see you in Hell first!"

He started, taken aback. Her own utterance had shocked her. "Am I a street-walker already," she asked herself, "that I begin to curse and swear?"

A whistle trilled. He started and said:

"So then, all is over between us?"

She bent her head assentingly, and her glance fell guiltily on Bawne who was standing near. Von Herrnung, aware of him at the same instant, turned on him with a scowl and the harsh demand:

"What is this? Do little English boys pry and listen?"

Bawne returned, looking at the other squarely:

"Beg pardon, but Mr. Sherbrand's calling you. He says it's getting jolly late."

"So!" Von Herrnung glanced at his wrist-watch, in the act lifting the brown leather satchel into fullest view. The boy queried with open-eyed innocent curiosity:

"Shall I carry that? Are you going to take it with you?"

"Es mag wohl sein," von Herrnung answered. Then he clicked his heels and bowed formally, and kissed Patrine's cold and heavy hand. She felt his teeth grit as he did it. She knew he was swearing in his way.

"Adieu, then," he said, smiling at her maliciously. "Will you not wish me Angenehme Reise?"

"Certainly. A pleasant voyage, and a safe landing!" Her eyes fell on Bawne's little, oddly garbed figure and her woman's heart spoke in spite of her. "Take care of my dearest!" broke from her, and von Herrnung answered:

"He is your dearest? Ah yes! I will certainly take very good care of him!"

He bowed, wheeled about and walked from her with his long strides, and the boy, with a face all flushed and quivering, suddenly jumped at her neck and hugged her; bringing with the rough little embrace the queer scent of water-proofed material and dubbined leather, knocking the silver-spangled hat awry, loosening divers tortoiseshell hairpins and an amethyst slide-buckle holding up the heavy tresses of the dead beech-leaf coloured hair, as he whispered:

"Remember I love you, Pat. Don't mind!"

And she shuddered as he freed her, and ran from her, asking herself: How much had the child overheard of von Herrnung's proposal? What had he comprehended of what he had heard?

Next, she was aware of the pleasant voice of Sherbrand calling, and saw von Herrnung imperiously beckoning. A cold sickness of dread assailed her, and her knees trembled underneath her weight. A mechanic came running past, carrying away the chair Davis had brought her. He set it down at a safe distance from the aëroplane, and she staggered to it, leaning on the long staff of her sunshade, and sat heavily down, feeling chilly and old....

Saxham had squeezed Bawne's shoulder and kissed him, and then withdrawn to a distance whence he could see all that took place. He watched Davis and Sherbrand help the boy into the forward cockpit, and fasten about him the safety belt attached to the fuselage on either side of the fixed bamboo seat.

"You are sure you really want to fly again? Mind, I believe you're as safe with him as houses, but if you don't want to go, say the word, and you shan't!"

Sherbrand whispered the words as he busied himself with the boy. And Bawne set his small teeth and squared his sturdy boyish shoulders, registering an unspoken vow to go in spite of all....

One had been told to drop a word to Sherbrand if one found oneself in a tight place. But could one ever hold up one's head again before the Patrol, if one did this? To share one's Mission with another when the Chief had said "I'd rather you'd carry through on your own" wasn't to be thought of. Mother—he swallowed hard at the thought of her—would say so too.

It troubled his faithful little soul that he could no longer see von Herrnung. He heard him talking in his guttural English, to Davis, whom Bawne could not see either—as he stood near the nose of the machine, in readiness to start the tractor—any more than the two mechanics who steadied the Bird, pressing each a toe on the axle of the under-carriage as they held on to a steel rod that ran along under the rearward edges of her single plane.

His final directions sharply given, von Herrnung stepped up on the under-carriage, threw a long leg over the bulwark of the fuselage, and stepped into the pilot's pit. Bawne screwed his head round and saw, through and over a low talc wind-shield, the upright torso of the German, big, hard, and indomitable, the leather satchel still gripped in his strapped-up left hand.

"Are you going to take that leather case along with you?" Sherbrand's voice had a note of surprise in it. "You'll find it a handicap, let me say. You can't sit on it or lean against it, and if you tried to put it under you, you'd find it dead-certain to foul the controls."

To Sherbrand's voice, von Herrnung's answered harshly and rather angrily:

"Surely I shall be able to carry this? It is nott-thing but a folding camera, with a telephoto lens made especially for Survey and Reconnaissance. There is still a good light. If I fly with the sun behind me, I shall be able to take quite a panorama of London North-West. It is not forbidden—no? Your Government would not object?"

"I don't suppose my Government would care a little hang!" Sherbrand's voice answered. "But—this isn't one of your German Army Albatros's or Kondors, and I don't see where you're to stow your camera, unless in the observer's pit. Of course the hovering installation takes up a lot of room, and I can't possibly risk your hampering the controls."

"Ganz recht! Very good!" came von Herrnung's voice, giving in with simulated heartiness. In another moment his long legs, followed by his great body, came scrambling into the forward cockpit, and his hands busied themselves about the stout belt of pig-leather that secured the boy in the observer's seat.

"Look here, my fellow! You will take care of this for me? See, I have passed the belt-strap through the handle. Do not touch it!" The guttural whisper had menace in it. "I shall be sure to know if you touch it, or try to unbuckle the strap."

"What's up?" Sherbrand's head and shoulders came thrusting over the other side of the cockpit. "Why did you unstrap him?" he demanded brusquely of von Herrnung. "Don't you know that he is my friend's son, and that it is my business to see to this?" Sherbrand's hand felt over Bawne's belts and bucklings before his head and shoulders vanished. Then von Herrnung's big body withdrew itself. His voice, sounding from the pilot's pit on the other side of the low wind-shield, gave a peremptory order, and the tractor began slowly to revolve. An instant later, with a blinding flash, it began to roar and whizz round furiously. The Bird, freed from the hands that detained her, leaped forwards, hurtling over the smooth turf at the speed of a racing motor-car. The smooth floor of the cockpit unexpectedly tilted up, and a rough cold wind buffeted Bawne about the head and shoulders, sent eddies down about his dangling feet, bellowed in his covered ears and made him gasp for breath. Then—houses and people, trees, and hangars fell suddenly away, and he knew that the Bird was rushing upwards at the bidding of its "Gnome" motor—long superseded now, but then the latest marvel in aërial engineering—towards the blue sky with its lines of gilt mackerel clouds. On each side of the roaring, flashing whirl that meant the tractor, spread North Middlesex, with its fields fast diminishing to the size of billiard tables. That patch no bigger than a garden-lawn, with a row of wooden things like dog-kennels and chicken-coops, must be—Bawne knew that it was—the aërodrome. Deafened by the noise and a little sick, for the roaring, striving, hurtling Thing in whose body he sat fastened, stank horribly of castor oil, and seemed to agonise and call on Bawne to suffer with it—he looked up and took courage from the warm, blue, beautiful, cheerful sky.

He was quitting himself like a man. Nobody could say otherwise. How high, how much higher was the Bird going to climb?

CHAPTER XXXII

ADVENTURE IN THE AIR

He looked down, and under his feet, left of the long transparent case that housed the horizontal hovering gear, was a little steel-framed glass port. Seen through this, the ground with its trees, fields and houses, hurried along beneath him as though a comet, travelling in the opposite direction, had been harnessed to our old earth, and was towing her away.

The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle. It had tilted upwards. Now it tilted all to one side. Sick and dizzy, but secure, the boy hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a wing of the Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little prayer. Then the cockpit floor became more level, and the wind buffeted less. The roar of the tractor and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips. But nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing would!

He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off bumping. His mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt dry and stiff. Only Our Lord and Our Lady and his guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this Bawne was grateful. They understood, and—people—would not.

He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock. By the genial warmth on one cheek and shoulder, and the way his shadow stretched over the pale grained ash-wood that lined the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon the left.

He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low wind screen behind him, against the background of a sky all flaming and boiling with molten gold and liquid amber, he saw the wide square shoulders and tall helmeted head of von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly through their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight inflexible line under the tight red roll of the moustache.

The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung shouted something. Nothing reached the boy but a sort of muffled roar. He shook his head vigorously, and then—one does not wear the Signaller's Badge for nothing!—released a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the arm-rest, and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge of the fuselage:

"I—can't—hear!"

The Code was understood. The helmeted head, some four feet distant, nodded. One of von Herrnung's gauntleted hands freed itself from the steering-bar. Its knuckles drubbed out the question:

"Have you the brown satchel?"

Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel. He screwed back his head and looked down and there it was, lying on the numb knees of him, buckled to him by the tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat. He nodded assent, and signalled:

"All right!"

"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the hurly-burly of the Bird's transit. Bawne mustered courage to knock out:

"Where are we? When shall we go down?"

Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described a sweeping half-circle. The brusque gesture answered Bawne's first question, bidding him look and see.

The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions, wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of the Bird's fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded over her bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north, the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her left as she flew. Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals, and one broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it, were swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the steering-wheel.

Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon, innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all. That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy's eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be alive.

Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an old wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours gone by.

He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing, or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.

"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and signalled in answer:

"One hour!"

"When do we go home?"

"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his seat to wait.

Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast.

"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that meant—that could only mean the Sea.

He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down below.

Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aëroplane in deluges of invisible spray.

On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water, were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears of the boy in the aëroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of the tractor-screw.

Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary, vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.

Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany—or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark—with more rarely some big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.

Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you—together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.

The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south, upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed, sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was ravenous.

From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving headland with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the Bird at what seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the tall granite towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron, rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway spiralled round each shaft to a railed stone platform well above high-water mark. And a shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck of blue handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting through what was presumably a megaphone. In reality the lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone storm-signal which hung point downwards from the west end of the yard-arm, presaging a south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this warning was lost upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a great upleaping billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a withered leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's eye does—and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad triple beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and south. In the same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea, the very Sea.

CHAPTER XXXIII

BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH

Something in the blood of the child answered to the call of the Ancient Mother. He cried out, half in terror, half in delight, and the cockpit tilted so suddenly that he was violently jerked against the seat-back and the canvas bulkhead behind him. Looking up he saw a large old moon of luminous yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot with pink and grey as though hollowed out of a fire-opal. The Bird was rushing through space at ninety miles an hour, and great lumps of cold salt wind splashed over Bawne and took his breath away, and his hands were numbed with bitter cold and his legs were legs of ice.

So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved it and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level, and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck. He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung, who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of chocolate. Still munching he signalled:

"Hungry?"

He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of the upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil with his teeth, and crunched it greedily.

He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this, akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine. "Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not until she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he, von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman might be wreaked by the simple act of carrying off the boy, whom he had regarded until then as a mere bag of ballast; less useful, but certain to prove less troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might or might not carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his overalls with which to enforce his protest against being taken away.

Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic pistol. A deadly shot, he would have been capable of dealing with half a dozen Davises upon the solid ground. But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw himself steering with one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis sat astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued with an eighteen-and-sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber, loaded with the cheap little cordite cartridges, whose pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big man.

"What is this? You are sick?"

Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course between the compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an electric bulb, his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the dismal malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him. And in the sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on power once more, the broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as it ran eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered space of deck before him and showing him to the white-faced boy who had twisted round once more to look at him, as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.

"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"

Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:

"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is—Germany. You will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"

The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white face was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy visage, there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to other business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind might blow hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his course the true one, for the white headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his port beam. He told himself she was one of the Elbe Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for Hamburg Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made her look like a black water-beetle with golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea. Following the course of the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey against the pink-and-golden sunrise—the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless—marking the journey's end.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE BROWN SATCHEL

The journey's end. A gust, tearing the mist that veiled the livid waters, showed the shadowy shapes of a procession of battleships, steaming southwards in single line.

You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on the aëroplane's port beam, craning over, counting the speedlights passing diagonally underneath. Eight steel Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric light through fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen against a background of dull grey plush.

Eight rushing, neutral-tinted shapes—conveying a formidable impression of grim power, and force, and ruthlessness. A Squadron of Battle Cruisers of the British Home Fleet, new from the brine of Lerwick Waters, or the fierce green surges of Scapa Flow. Bound for Harwich Roads or Sheerness, or the Solent, to figure in the huge pageant of steel and steam, electricity, and man-power that would be called the King's Review.

What a chance, supposing Der Tag were come already, for the delivery of a consignment of bombs! It warmed like a draught of wine, to think of the devastating effect of a couple of such German love-gifts, exploded in the bowels of one of those steel monsters, packed with complex machinery, high explosives, and inflammable oil. True, there might be a reverse to the medal, damping even to the spirits of a Superman. Wireless signals would go forth at the order of one amongst a little knot of dark figures on the forebridge of the Flagship, warning each of those grey monsters of its danger. Not an armoured cruiser scouting for them on the horizon, not one of all the torpedo-boat destroyers in their vicinity, not a submarine nosing in the thick cold darkness below the restless white crests, but would join in the man-hunt that must ensue.

How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes, and long rays of searchlight would go probing, and the mobile noses of guns great and lesser would be thrust from their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing bloodthirstily for the enemy up in the sky. While from the Flagship's mothering side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun, might swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the white snarl of waves with a vicious scream of her propeller, and, keen as a gull-hunting sea-hawk, launch herself in chase.

Pfui! The thought made one sick at the stomach. Cold, isolation, and darkness tried a man, no matter how courageous. Buffeted by the bitter wind, aching and stiff with weariness, lonely with the loneliness of some small bird of the migratory order, outstripped by its companions on the wild journey over the North Sea, the Kaiser's messenger drew energy and cheer from the conviction that the dispatches entrusted to him by Imperial favour were such as would hasten the arrival of The Day.

The Day, to which all good German officers devoted the second toast on Mess nights. When the Black Eagle would swoop, and the nodding witch-hag Britannia would awaken from her whisky-dreams of World-Dominion to find her armour obsolete, her sword rusted in its scabbard, the trident of Sea Power stolen from her hand.

Hurrah! for The Day when the programme arranged by the All Highest War Lord and his War Chiefs should be carried out in the complete overthrow of British Supremacy, the seizure and domination of British territory, the solution of the Great German Race Problem, in the transformation of the United Kingdom into a German dependency,—the annexation of India and the British Colonies—and the forcible Teutonisation of the hated race.

Aha! Much to be locked in an Imperial messenger's letter-bag, thought von Herrnung, greedily. What in the way of guerdon might not be lavished by a gratified All Highest upon the danger-braving and to-duty-fearlessly-devoted Flying Officer who should accomplish the Secret Mission, and lay the brown satchel at the Imperial feet.

Probably the Second—tchah!—the First Class of the Iron Cross—with military promotion, and a handsome sum in hard cash. Laudatory articles in the State-inspired Press organs and Service Gazettes presently. Meanwhile, was it fitting that the future of von Herrnung should lie, not upon the knees of the gods, but on the lap of a little, seasick English boy?

True, the brown satchel was firmly strapped to the boy, now lying in an attitude of complete exhaustion, with one arm thrown over the gunwale, and his small round head feebly nodding to and fro. The child knew nothing of the Imperial dispatches. And yet—one would have been wiser to keep the bag about one, in spite of the danger of fouling the controls.

It will be gathered that a chilly premonition of imminent disaster crawled in the veins of the Kaiser's messenger. Hunger and fatigue were spurring von Herrnung to imaginativeness unworthy of a Superman.

Now he knew his frail winged craft beset by cunning, treacherous enemies; the invisible air that cradled and supported her, only waiting to destroy. Other elemental forces, Gale, Lightning, Hail, Waterspout—in collusion to bring about her swift and speedy ruin. The Sea, no less than these, was an implacable adversary, reaching up innumerable greedy hands to drag her down and drown. The hawk-hoverer would have been a help at this juncture if one had had some previous experience in the use of it. As things were, it was wiser to leave the Englishman's invention alone. A labouring beat admonished the man's quick ear of impending engine-trouble. Ah, if the motor, that was the living heart in the aëroplane, should break down at this juncture, or the human intelligence perched behind the roaring tractor falter, the game was up. Kaput for von Herrnung, he very well knew.

As though the very fear had brought on the catastrophe, the revolutions dropped. Below 1000, said the indicator's trembling finger, and there was a miss. The bang!—bang! of a back-fire followed. If one had believed in God, now, this would have been the time to pray to Him.

But now the aviator's keen eye, peering downwards through Sherbrand's binoculars, picked up something that had emerged with a sudden yeasty swirl among the white-crested waves. No handsomer nor bigger than an under-sized steam-trawler, the casual observer might as such have accepted her. But a moment more, and fore and aft of the stocky little pseudo-steamer, stretched the long snaky, whitey-brown hull of a submarine.

U-18, on observation-service off Spurn Head, or a Britisher? An Evans signalling-pistol, loaded, and with a supply of spare rockets, was fixed in a cleat beside the instrument-board, within reach of the pilot's hand. The altimeter, illuminated by the electric bulb, gave an altitude of six hundred, as von Herrnung snatched the pistol, and fired, aiming towards the sky.

The shot was followed by a second detonation, and a brilliant crimson light illuminated the grey welter, throwing up orange balls of fire as it ascended, to burst in showers of incandescent sparks. Switching off, von Herrnung strained both ears and eyes for an answer to his signal. With the cessation of the motor the diapason of the North Sea rolled upwards through the twilight with a threatening of storm. As the weather-cone had presaged, a gale was coming. It blew strongly from the north-west. The engine back-fired again, and von Herrnung swore at it, trying to make out the nationality of the submarine running on the surface six hundred feet below. There were half-a-dozen tallish figures on the narrow man-railed catwalk running along her hull forward, and one upon the screened-in platform of her humpy conning-tower.

Then the blue-white ray of a searchlight leaped forth illuminating her bows and forward torpedo-tubes—revealing the long neutral-coloured hull with the Wireless mast raised for use and soapy seas hissing off the armour-plate. A backwash of brilliance picked out the black-white-and-red Jack of Germany, fluttering from a short pole-mast sternwards. Signal-lights of white and two colours broke out upon another slender mast aft of her conning-tower, and winked and jabbered. U-18 was in touch with her man.

It was quite time, for the Bird's engine hiccupped more and more disastrously, and her pilot's frozen hands could only guess the steering-wheel. He grunted relief. Sapperlot! One's star had not deserted one. Once more the Prussian Field-Flying Service would, with reason, quote von Herrnung's hellish good-luck.

Meanwhile the submarine's three lights chattered volubly in German Navy Code. Do Not Attempt Make Harbour. Heavy Weather Coming. Original Orders Cancelled. Heave To. Will Stand By To Take You Aboard. To which von Herrnung, keeping pace with U-18, replied with long and short flashes of an electric signalling-torch. Understood! What Is the Sea Like? Keep Off and On. Am Coming Down!

And he came forthwith. The Commander of U-18, standing on the little platform over which furious seas were slashing, watched him critically through a pair of Zeiss binoculars. You, too, are asked to see him; pulling round the Bird's head into the teeth of the nor'wester; shutting off her hiccupping engine, implacably thrusting her nose seawards, and diving with a splendid swoop into the widening paths of spirals that ended amidst the angry surges below.

Hitting the North Sea with so shattering a slap that the Bird's landing-carriage crumpled and buckled, and the frail spars of her wings crunched like the bones of a small bird in the jaws of a hungry cat.

A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a ton of water on von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out of the man. He tore open the safety-belt as consciousness left him, and recovered in the warm benzine-flavoured stuffiness of the officer's cabin aboard the U-18, to the stinging of schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer of German words in his ear.

"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another time, when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship a life-belt, if you are wise!"

Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of yellow oilies, and a sou'wester shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and now twinkling with his bit of fun.

But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt, volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery. He gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got out:

"The boy—the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil's name?"

Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:

"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he's alive. Don't worry about that!"

Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered furiously:

"Himmelkreüzbombenelement! What is the verdammt boy to me? It is the satchel that was strapped about the boy's middle I am asking for—the Emperor's—Herr Gott!—I shall go mad!"

He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into desperate activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the surges of the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to the U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's order to be finally abandoned to her fate.

CHAPTER XXXV

NUMBER EIGHTEEN

They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird's waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.

"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander, on receiving the news that the Kind had breathed, and vomited sea-water. Luttha promptly led the way to the men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an earringed first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body, outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous glare of the electric light.

Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of him just then, except North Sea, so they wrapped him in a blue Navy blanket, and left him in charge of Petty Officer Stoll.

"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count," said the Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the vibrating steel box over the upper accumulators, called the officers' cabin, and separated from the men's quarters by a paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel. You are asked to consider it furnished with seven narrow folding bunks, a trestle-table about as wide and long as a coffin-lid, some folding chairs, a marvellous array of charts on spring-rollers, fixed against the steel walls, a row of wooden lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary gyro-compass, several cylinders of oxylithe for respiratory emergencies, an electric stove of small size, a log-book and writing materials, a shelf of German literature, chiefly nautical reference-books; sets of dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes and a telephone, a gramophone and a giant cuspidor.

Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit and soaked underclothes for dry flannels lent by the Second-in-Command, topped off with a pair of the Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock belonging to the biggest man on board. You can see him supplementing the shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots: thrusting his huge arms into the guernsey, beginning already to be superior to his rescuers upon the strength of his family rank and wealth and his flying-record, his bulk and handsomeness, and his magpie pearl. He was of the Prussian top-dog breed and let others know it, even whilst smarting under his loss. That he felt it was shown by the livid pallor testifying to mental disquiet and physical exhaustion. But he judged it wisest to bluff, and did.

"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had not arrived in the nick of time," he said suggestively, smiling under the red moustache that hung uncurled over his full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you found me swimming in the water—the aëroplane having foundered—it is merely rewording a report!"

"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander, chewing hard at an unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva into the cuspidor, and smiling in a wry and dubious fashion. "But when I said things were hellishly unfortunate, I meant unfortunate for you!"

He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as a cabin table, and took from a weighted document-file a pencilled paper-slip.

"As far as they concern you I will read you them as taken down by our Wireless operator. 'To Undersea-boat No. 18, on observation-duty off Spurn Head. Stand by to get in touch with, act pilot, and render aid if necessary to German Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to Nordeich in British aëroplane.' The message comes from the German Embassy in London and the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz Heinrich. I have carried out my instructions to the letter. There is only one man going to be broken over this affair!"

Von Herrnung knew who the man was. The Commander chewed some more of his cigar, picked his oozing yellow oilskins off the deck, thrust himself into them, crowned himself with his sou'wester, and said, taking a farewell shot at the cuspidor:

"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire! I am sorry for you, bei Gott! But to make game of those who command me is not the purpose for which I am commissioned, Herr Count. Nor have I any experience in doctoring reports. I rate only as Lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy—a man born of plain people—without fortune or even von before my family name!"

Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the only human being who could help him. He apologised subserviently, and catching at the straw afforded him by the Commander's admission of poverty, offered him the pickings of the wrecked aëroplane.

"For her instruments and signalling outfit—the seats and vacuum flasks even—are well worth the having, and her engine and tractor will sell for——" he named the sum in marks. "There is a patent stabiliser under her belly that I reserve for Majesty—the French have bought it or think they have!"

The speaker rubbed his hands. The hoverer might yet prove a sop for the All Highest. Imperial displeasure thus averted, all would go well. He added, feeling that he might actually afford the luxury of grumbling:

"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with special missions. Conceive it. I am at a Hendon Flying School,—chatting with a handsome Englishwoman who has taken me for her lover—as I am waiting to get an inkling of the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth buying for use in their Service Aëronautique. I am summoned by a groom of our Embassy to speak to some Excellencies—I follow and find myself clicking my heels before Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von Bohlen in an Embassy auto-car—to be sent off at a moment's notice in a little cranky devil of an English monoplane—with secret dispatches for the All Highest—on a journey over the North Sea. With the barometer falling and the hour past five meridian. That's my luck!" The speaker paused for breath.

Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers with a crisp sound, a trick of his when in meditation:

"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for long-distance flying. And luck it was!—if you had been of my mind. Tell me, did not they give you plain instructions?"

"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha answered calmly:

"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language, they would have said: 'Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's hands. And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your very skin to you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next your heart!'"

The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:

"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a nobleman! I would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You strapped it about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?"

"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"

Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps, was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and a wave of the hand:

"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the dispatches contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another messenger. That is the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?"

"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them, and that place is the London War Office!"

The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his piercing little eyes into von Herrnung's as he asked:

"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it. It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean War,—taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again ejected,—because—Grosse Gott!—it was too inhuman! As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to mankind. Pfui! Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine. Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience under the rod of Fear!"

Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured and hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty, clenched fist:

"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have drunk so long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall strong-vaults, see you!—but the originals from the muniment-room of the Welsh castle, the country-seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour after you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a man know everything with Wireless? And you, with no inkling that you carried for Germany—Victory in the World-War that is coming—you who have lost Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, bei Gott!"

He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:

"As I have said, I pity you!—though you have tried to bribe me!—but it will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your cartridges are wetted—your revolver will not serve you. And you will not get a chance to drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My fellows have got the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it away, with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor, whose property they are! Then we run, only periscopes showing, for the Gat of Norderney. There is a clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour, navigable in any tide. You have to account there to the All Highest for the satchel, or I, bei Gott! must account to him for it and you!"

And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow gangway and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck. Two of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his instructions, to be left alone, you understand.

One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed Him so industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the lieutenants offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000 h.p. Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with only her periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.

Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back the last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack, beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate worlds.

Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the same fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning, and fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.

CHAPTER XXXVI

HUE AND CRY

Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death, the buff broadsheets of the Evening Wire edged the kerbs of Fleet Street and ran up Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:

AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET. STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN. AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS. THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE. "COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC STROKE?"

Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east, north, south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of thousands and disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened the throttle, and the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a taxi going over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the aërial ascent.

The small audience interested in the aëroplane, her freight, and her behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the ear. The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last three-seater air-bus had rounded the aërodrome, landed and deposited the last passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but the rest had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.

The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line. Rooks and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no longer brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and hangars, the waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the selling of stale boutonnières about the entrances of restaurants, the serving of drinks and suppers at night-clubs and so on.

On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken her departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to the sky as they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously alike.

There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick, fair eyebrows. He was ready to swear it was the same girl. But the face that had looked into his that night in Paris was somehow softer, younger.... It was not only the alteration in the colour of the hair.... If you had taken the big, hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and dipped her into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not only her hair but her whole body had been bleached, you would not have accomplished such a transformation—unless the chemical had possessed the power to change the colour of her mind and soul.

The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly, and spoken to you like a pal. In that atmosphere of sexual excitement, amongst those crowds of men and women, flushed with meat and wine and the desire of sensual pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented breeze from the North.

Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him who had no sisters. He had often wondered how she came to be in that place. But it had never occurred to him to lump her with the ordinary pleasure-seeker. He had read—more correctly than von Herrnung, who believed her from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of Knowledge—Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile, and honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.

What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed, browny-green as agate. What a wonderful voice came out of the depths of her splendid chest. The arch of her breastbone reminded you of a violoncello. How splendidly her head was set upon its column of warm, living ivory! Her firm round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had failed to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady of the Isle of Music. Everything about her was planned on the scale of magnificence. Six feet tall, she walked the earth like a goddess, or as women must have walked when the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.

Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while Destiny limped towards him in the person of an undersized telegraph-clerk whose complexion, previously pallid, had deteriorated to dirty green. He began, extending a shaky hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:

"For you, sir. Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his tools, so 'e burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner. They rung us up about twenty times while he was at the job. And the message is important, sir!"

"I'll see! Thank you, Burgin!"

Sherbrand took the telegram from the jerky hand and read:

"Your—German—acquaintance—suspected—agent— robbery—documents—national—importance. At—all— costs—keep—him—until—I—come."

The Chief's name at the end was the nail that clinched the thing. But the cry of Macrombie's undersized assistant was the hammer-blow that drove the nail to the quick. His sharp eye, following the climbing aëroplane, had seen her flatten and swing about and leap forwards, exactly as the carrier-pigeon strikes out its line of flight for home.

"My Gawd," he yelped out. "See there! Blimy, if the —'s not done us! Bunked it by air to Kaiserland while I was spellin' out the screed. Gone with the Bird—the Bird and the 'overing gear. My Gawd! Wot's to be done?"

"Shut your head on what you know!" said Sherbrand's voice in the pale clerk's ear as Sherbrand's hand fell ungently on his shoulder. "You've done your best! It's not your fault if luck was on the other side! But—" His eyes went to the Doctor's great figure standing beside the tall white shape with the hat of twinkling silver. "But the boy!" A sickness swirled up in him and a dizziness overtopped it. He caught at and gripped the clerk's thin shoulder to keep himself upright. "My God! How shall I break it to the Doctor," Sherbrand asked himself, "if that German fellow has carried off the boy?"

"Steady-O! Ketch on to me, sir.... Nobody's looking!" said the telegraph clerk. He was a hero-worshipper on a robust scale and Sherbrand his chosen deity. "This ain't our young Boss givin' in, but just his empty inside playin' tricks on him," he assured himself. To Sherbrand he said humbly: "If you'd come over to the cabin there's hot cocoa and toke there. Grub'll steady you, if you'll excuse me taking the liberty of saying so—and you can't do nothing till he comes!"

The person to whom Burgin referred had passed the entrance-gates, almost before the sentence left the lips of the clerk. Now his alert, upright figure came in sight, briskly turning the corner of the restaurant, and wrought to the point of ironic merriment by the greatness of the blow that had fallen on him, Sherbrand shook off his dizziness and faintness, straightened his tall body, clapped both hands to his mouth, and gave the huntsman's view-halloo:

"Stole away! Stole—awa-aay!"

Small cause for mirth, and yet he laughed, pointing to the dwindling speck high upon the north horizon that represented the worldly prospects of Sherbrand, and a handsome sum in cash. The Bird, just then entering a broad belt of gold-white mackerel-cloud, was lost to view in another instant. But the Chief had wheeled upon the pointing gesture, and seen, and understood.

Then he was upon them, saying in accents jarred with anger:

"How was this allowed to happen? You were warned. You had my wire?"

Sherbrand's mouth was wrung awry with another spasm of mirthless laughter. He fought it back and held out the crumpled slip of paper, saying:

"I did, but luck was on his side. Thanks to a relapse on Macrombie's part, I got this after the Bird had flown."

"The Bird..."

The blue-grey eyes and the keen hazel met, and struck a spark between them.

"'The Bird.' He has taken French leave—or, more appropriately, German—by the help of your machine?"

Sherbrand nodded, setting his teeth grimly. The wailing voice of the pallid clerk came in like a refrain:

"'Ooked it. Bunked—so 'elp me Jimmy Johnson! With our young guv'nor's mono', and the gyro 'overer!"

Said the Chief, moving sharply towards where the Wireless mast straddled over the telegraph-cabin:

"He has adopted the only means of exit by which it was possible for him to escape. All railways stations are being watched, all highways patrolled by our agents, travelling in high-powered motor-cars. We are on the look-out for him at every ocean shipping-port. One road we left open, not having the means to block it—and that is the road of the stork and the swan! Decidedly, I might have guessed that he would play Young Lochinvar after this fashion. But until I left the ground an hour ago I did not know of the theft of the Clanronald Plan."