out eleven thousand feet above the sea and still spindling slowly. His
head was craned over the side of the car, and he surveyed the country
below with an expression of profound perplexity; ever and again his lips
shaped inaudible words. "Shootin' at a chap," for example, and "I'll
come down right enough soon as I find out 'ow." Over the side of
the basket the robe of the Desert Dervish was hanging, an appeal for
consideration, an ineffectual white flag.

He was now very distinctly aware that the world below him, so far from
being the naive countryside of his earlier imaginings that day, sleepily
unconscious of him and capable of being amazed and nearly reverential
at his descent, was acutely irritated by his career, and extremely
impatient with the course he was taking.--But indeed it was not he
who took that course, but his masters, the winds of heaven. Mysterious
voices spoke to him in his ear, jerking the words up to him by means
of megaphones, in a weird and startling manner, in a great variety of
languages. Official-looking persons had signalled to him by means of
flag flapping and arm waving. On the whole a guttural variant of English
prevailed in the sentences that alighted upon the balloon; chiefly he
was told to "gome down or you will be shot."

"All very well," said Bert, "but 'ow?"

Then they shot a little wide of the car. Latterly he had been shot at
six or seven times, and once the bullet had gone by with a sound so
persuasively like the tearing of silk that he had resigned himself to
the prospect of a headlong fall. But either they were aiming near him or
they had missed, and as yet nothing was torn but the air about him--and
his anxious soul.

He was now enjoying a respite from these attentions, but he felt it was
at best an interlude, and he was doing what he could to appreciate
his position. Incidentally he was having some hot coffee and pie in an
untidy inadvertent manner, with an eye fluttering nervously over the
side of the car. At first he had ascribed the growing interest in his
career to his ill-conceived attempt to land in the bright little upland
town, but now he was beginning to realise that the military rather than
the civil arm was concerned about him.

He was quite involuntarily playing that weird mysterious part--the part
of an International Spy. He was seeing secret things. He had, in fact,
crossed the designs of no less a power than the German Empire, he had
blundered into the hot f