the twins
in Quebec. And now Alan had told me that Polter was up there! We had
never ceased to believe that Dr. Kent was alive, and that Polter was
the midnight marauder. And as we grew older, we began to search for
Polter. It seemed to us that now we were older, if we could once get
our hands on him, we could drag from him the truth in which the police
had failed.

* * * * *

The call of a traffic director in mid-Vermont brought me back from
these vivid thoughts. My buzzer was clanging; a peremptory
halting-signal day-beam came darting up at me from below. It caught me
and clung: I shouted down at it.

"What's the matter?" I gave my name and number and all the details in
a breath. Above everything I had no wish to be halted now. "What's the
matter? I haven't done anything wrong."

"The hell you haven't," the director roared. "Come down to three
thousand. That lane's barred."

I dove obediently and his beam followed me. "Once more like that,
young fellow--" But he went busy with somebody else and I didn't hear
the end of his threat.

I crossed into Maine in mid-afternoon. Twilight was upon me. The sky
was solid lead. The landscape all up through here was gray-white with
snow in the gathering darkness. I passed the city of Jackman, crossing
full over it to take no chances of annoying the border officials; and
a few miles further, I dropped to the glaring lights of the
International Inspection Field. The formalities were soon finished. I
was ready to take-away when Alan rushed at me.

"George! I thought I could connect here." He gripped me. He was
wild-eyed, incoherent. He waved his taxiplane away. "I'm going back
with my friend. George. I can't--I don't know what's happened to her.
_She's_ gone, now!"

"Who's gone? Babs?"

"Yes." He pushed me into my plane and climbed in after me. "Don't
talk. Get us up! I'll tell you then. I shouldn't have left."

When we were up in the air, I swung on him. "What are you talking
about? Babs gone?"

I could feel myself shuddering with a nameless horror.

"I don't know what I'm talking about, George. I'm about crazy. The
Quebec police think I am, anyway. I been raising hell with them for an
hour. Babs is gone. I can't find her. I don't know where she is."

* * * * *

He finally calmed down enough to tell me. Shortly after his radiophone
to me in New York, he had missed Babs. They had had lunch in the huge
ho