rdnance in the world, already four times decorated for his services to
the Emperor.

"The labour of nine years!" he answered with emotion. "Nine long years
of self-denial and unremitting study! But to-night I shall be repaid,
repaid a thousand times."

The officers shook hands with him one after the other, and the group
broke up; the men who were filling the trench completed their labours
and departed; and Von Heckmann and the major-general of artillery alone
remained, except for the sentries beside the gun. The night was balmy
and the moon rode in a cloudless sky high above the hill. They crossed
the enclosure, followed by the two sentinels, and entering a passage
reached the outer wall of the redoubt, which was in turn closed and
locked. Here the sentries remained, but Von Heckmann and the general
continued on behind the fortifications for some distance.

"Well, shall we start the ball?" asked the general, laying his hand on
Von Heckmann's shoulder. But the inventor found it so hard to master his
emotion that he could only nod his head. Yet the ball to which the
general alluded was the discharging of a fiendish war machine toward an
unsuspecting and harmless city alive with sleeping people, and the
emotion of the inventor was due to the fact that he had devised and
completed the most atrocious engine of death ever conceived by the mind
of man--the Relay Gun. Horrible as is the thought, this otherwise normal
man had devoted nine whole years to the problem of how to destroy human
life at a distance of a hundred kilometres, and at last he had been
successful, and an emperor had placed with his own divinely appointed
hands a ribbon over the spot beneath which his heart should have been.

The projectile of this diabolical invention was ninety-five centimetres
in diameter, and was itself a rifled mortar, which in full flight,
twenty miles from the gun and at the top of its trajectory, exploded in
mid-air, hurling forward its contained projectile with an additional
velocity of three thousand feet per second. This process repeated
itself, the final or core bomb, weighing over three hundred pounds and
filled with lyddite, reaching its mark one minute and thirty-five
seconds after the firing of the gun. This crowning example of the human
mind's destructive ingenuity had cost the German Government five million
marks and had required three years for its construction, and by no means
the least of its devilish capacities was tha