Park, pink now
in the light of sundown. Not a human being was perceptible in that scene
of headlong destruction. Then he came back to the American side of
the island, crossed close to the crumpled aluminium wreckage of the
Hohenzollern to Green Islet, and scrutinised the hopeless breach in the
further bridge and the water that boiled beneath it. Towards Buffalo
there was still much smoke, and near the position of the Niagara railway
station the houses were burning vigorously. Everything was deserted now,
everything was still. One little abandoned thing lay on a transverse
path between town and road, a crumpled heap of clothes with sprawling
limbs....

"'Ave a look round," said Bert, and taking a path that ran through the
middle of the island he presently discovered the wreckage of the two
Asiatic aeroplanes that had fallen out of the struggle that ended the
Hohenzollern.

With the first he found the wreckage of an aeronaut too.

The machine had evidently dropped vertically and was badly knocked
about amidst a lot of smashed branches in a clump of trees. Its bent and
broken wings and shattered stays sprawled amidst new splintered wood,
and its forepeak stuck into the ground. The aeronaut dangled weirdly
head downward among the leaves and branches some yards away, and Bert
only discovered him as he turned from the aeroplane. In the dusky
evening light and stillness--for the sun had gone now and the wind
had altogether fallen-this inverted yellow face was anything but a
tranquilising object to discover suddenly a couple of yards away. A
broken branch had run clean through the man's thorax, and he hung, so
stabbed, looking limp and absurd. In his hand he still clutched, with
the grip of death, a short light rifle.

For some time Bert stood very still, inspecting this thing.

Then he began to walk away from it, looking constantly back at it.

Presently in an open glade he came to a stop.

"Gaw!" he whispered, "I don' like dead bodies some'ow! I'd almost rather
that chap was alive."

He would not go along the path athwart which the Chinaman hung. He felt
he would rather not have trees round him any more, and that it would be
more comfortable to be quite close to the sociable splash and uproar of
the rapids.

He came upon the second aeroplane in a clear grassy space by the side of
the streaming water, and it seemed scarcely damaged at all. It looked as
though it had floated down into a position of rest. It lay on i