ge, wild look in his
eyes--I couldn't define it--and he brought his gaze back from far off
to stare at me as if I were a stranger.

Then: "Still got that A.B.C. ship?" he demanded.

"Yes," I answered wonderingly.

"Junk it!" he said. And his laugh was as wild and incomprehensible as
his look had been. I stared after him as he walked away. I was
puzzled, but there were other things to think of then.

A frenzy of preparation--and all in vain. The enemy fooled us; the
radio brought the word from Quebec.

"They have entered the St. Lawrence," was the message it flashed.
Then, later: "The Red fleet is passing toward Montreal. Enemy planes
have spotted all radio towers. There is one above us now--" And that
ended the message from Quebec.

But we got more information later. They landed near Montreal; they
were preparing a great base for offensive operations; the country was
overrun with a million men; the sky was full of planes by night and
day; there was no artillery, no field guns of any sort, but there were
torpedo-planes by tens of thousands, which made red fields of waiting
death where trucks placed them as they took them from the ships.

And there were some of us who smiled sardonically in recollection of
the mammoth plants the Vornikoff Reds had installed in Central Russia,
and the plaudits that had greeted their plans for nitrogen fixation.
They were to make fertilizers; the nitrates would be distributed
without cost to the farms--this had pacified the Agrarians--and here
were their "nitrates" that were to make fertile the fields of Russia:
countless thousands of tons of nitro-explosives in these flying
torpedoes!

* * * * *

But if we smiled mirthlessly at these recollections we worked while we
chewed on our cud of bitterness. There came an order: "Evacuate New
England," and the job was given to me.

With planes--a thousand of them--trucks, vans, the railroads, we
gathered those terrified people into concentration camps, and took
them over the ground, under the ground, and through the air to the
distributing camp at Buffalo, where they were scattered to other
points.

I saw the preparations for a battle-front below me as I skimmed over
Connecticut. Trenches made a thin line that went farther than I could
see! Here was the dam that was expected to stop the enemy columns from
the north. I think no one then believed that our air-force could check
the assault. The men of the f