legs of the bound
man that he might walk back into the cabin.

* * * * *

The take-off was not as smooth as it would have been had Chet's slim
hands been on the controls; this burly one who handled them now was
not accustomed to such sensitivity. But Chet felt the ship lift and
lurch, then settle down to a swift, spiralling ascent. Now he lay
still as he tried to ponder the situation.

"Now what dirty work are they up to?" he asked himself. He had seen a
sullen fury on the dark face of Herr Schwartzmann as he spoke the
names of Walt and Diane into the radio. Chet remembered the look now,
and he struggled vainly with the cords about his wrists. Even a
detonite pistol with its tiny grain of explosive in the end of each
bullet would not check him--not when Walt and Diane were endangered.
And the expression on that heavy, scowling face had told him all too
clearly that some real danger threatened.

But the cords held fast on his swollen wrists. His head was still
throbbing; and even his side, not entirely healed, was adding to the
torment that beat upon him--beat and beat with his pulsing
blood--until the beating faded out into unconsciousness....

Dimly he knew they were soaring still higher as their radio picked up
the warning of an approaching patrol ship; vaguely he realized that
they descended again to a level of observation. Chet knew in some
corner of his brain that Schwartzmann was watching from an under
lookout with a powerful glass, and he heard his excited command:

"Down--go slowly, down!... They are landing.... They have entered the
hangar. Now, down with it, Max! Down! down!"

* * * * *

The plunging fall of the ship roused Chet from his stupor. He felt the
jolt of the clumsy landing despite the snow-cushioned ground; he
heard plainly the exclamations from beyond an open port--the startled
oath in Walter Harkness' voice, and the stinging scorn in the words of
Diane Delacouer.

Herr Schwartzmann had been in the employ of Mademoiselle Delacouer,
but he was taking orders no longer. There was a sound of scuffling
feet, and once the thud of a blow.... Then Chet watched with heavy,
hopeless eyes as the familiar faces of Diane and Walt appeared in the
doorway. Their hands were bound; they, too, were threatened with a
slim-barreled pistol in the hands of the smirking, exultant
Schwartzmann.

A tall, thin-faced man whom Chet had not seen before