it as it shot down from the clouds, and the
thunder of its coming was like the roar of many cannon.

A ship of the red ones was in the air--a fighting ship, whose stripes
showed red--and it drove at the roaring menace with its steel beak and
a swirling cloud of gas. It seemed that they must crash, when to
McGuire's eyes came the stabbing flash of heavy guns from the shining
shape. A crashing explosion came down to them as the great beak parted
and fell, and the body of the red-striped monster opened in bursting
smoke and flame, tore slowly into fragments and fell swiftly to the
earth.

It struck with a shattering crash some distance away, but one pair of
eyes failed to follow it in its fall. For in the clear air above, with
the golden light of distant clouds upon it, a roaring monster of
silvery sheen had rolled and swept upward to the heights. And it
showed, as it turned, a painted emblem on its bow, a design of
clear-cut color, unbelievably familiar--a circle of blue, and within
it a white star and a bull's eye of red--the mark of the flying
service of the United States!

* * * * *

McGuire never knew how he got Althora and himself back to the building
whence he had come. Nor did he see the struggling figures on a
balcony, or the leap and fall of a maimed body, where Professor Sykes,
when the door had yielded, found surcease and oblivion on the pavement
below.

He was to learn that later, but now he had eyes only for a sight that
could be but a dream, an unreal vision of a disordered brain. He held
the slim form of Althora to him in a crushing grip, while he stared,
dry-eyed, above, and his own voice seemed to shout from afar off:
"They're ours!" that voice was screaming in a frenzy of exultation.
"They're our ships! They've come across!"

The fighting fleet of the red man-things of Venus was taking to the
air! The ships rose in a swarm of speeding, darting shapes, and the
great one of Torg was in the lead, climbing in fury toward the
heights.

Far above them the clouds of gold silhouetted a strange sight, and the
air was shaking with the thunder from on high, where, straight and
true, a line of silver ships in the sharp V of battle formation drove
downward in a deadly, swift descent.

And even afar off, the straining eyes of a half-crazed man could see
the markings on their bow--a circle and a star--and the colors of his
own lost fighters of the air.

CHAPTER XIX

The