ke his companion understand by much gesticulation
that the blockhead was taking the wrong direction.

But the "blockhead" knew what he was about, and after a half circle to
test the working of the engines, he opened the throttle and shot her
upwards at a terrific speed.

Well might his two passengers cling desperately to the gun brackets and
to each other, but their shriek of terror was drowned as the machine
gained an altitude of fifteen hundred feet and deliberately _looped the
loop_!

For a moment Dennis braced himself and clutched the wheel like a vice,
but the strap held, the circle was completed, and the Aviatik, righting
herself, skimmed over the pine-topped hill behind the hunting lodge, and
planed majestically down towards the starting-point.

Dennis's face was as white as a sheet of paper as he turned and glanced
back over his shoulder. He was alone!

"I hope it was playing the game," he muttered, as he brought the machine
to a stand. "At any rate, it was the only game I could play under the
circumstances."

He jumped down and ran towards the lodge, feeling shaken and trembly,
wondering what he would find. It struck him as odd that the garrulous
old forester had not returned. Was Laval dead or dying?

As he crossed the stream and mounted the slope he stopped, for the old
man's voice was bellowing furiously, and the old woman screamed in
concert.

"What on earth is going on?" thought the lad, and seeing that the
shutters of the ground-floor room in which he had left his friend had
been opened, and it being very nearly broad daylight, instead of
entering the hall he sprang to the window and looked in.

Claude Laval, terribly weak from loss of blood, but with an odd, defiant
smile on his face, was sitting upright in the carved chair, the sleeve
of his wounded arm slit from shoulder to wrist, revealing the drenched
blue-grey of his own French uniform beneath it. In front of him, his
white moustache bristling with fury, and murder in every line of his
wolf-like face, the old forester lifted a hatchet in both hands, while
his wife, no longer the trembling servile old peasant of half an hour
before, was tightening the knots of the rope she had thrown round
Laval's body, binding him tightly to the chair!

* * * * *

In the little village three leagues from Bar-le-Duc a powerful car drew
up in a cloud of dust in front of the restaurant where our friends had
dined the night b