resently had it under us. I held us at five hundred feet, and cut
our speed to the minimum of twenty miles an hour facing the gale,
though it was sixty or seventy when we turned. There were a score or
two of hooded ground lights. But there was little reflection aloft,
and in the murk of the snowfall I felt we would escape notice.

We crossed, turned and went back in an arc following Polter's outer
curved wall. We had a good view of it. A weird enough looking place,
here on its lonely hilltop. No wonder the wealthy "Frank Rascor" had
attained local prominence!

* * * * *

The whole property was irregularly circular, perhaps a mile in
diameter covering the almost flat dome of the hilltop. Around it,
completely enclosing it, Polter had built a stone and brick wall. A
miniature wall of China! We could see that it was fully thirty feet
high with what evidently were naked high-voltage wires protecting its
top. There were half a dozen little gates, securely barred, with
doubtless a guard at each of them.

Within the wall there were several buildings: a few small stone houses
suggesting workmen's dwellings; an oblong stone structure with smoke
funnels which seemed perhaps a smelter; a huge, dome-like spread of
translucent glass over what might have been the top of a mine-shaft.
It looked more like the dome of an observatory--an inverted bowl fully
a hundred feet wide and equally as high, set upon the ground. What did
it cover?

And, there was Polter's residence--a castle-like brick and stone
building with a central tower not unlike a miniature of the Chateau
Frontenac. We saw a stone corridor on the ground connecting the lower
floor of the castle with the dome, which lay about a hundred feet to
one side.

Could we chance landing inside the wall? There was a dark, level
expanse of snow where we could have done it, but our descending plane
would doubtless have been discovered. But the mile-wide inner area was
dark in many places. Spots of light were at the little wall-gates.
There was a glow all along the top of the wall. Lights were in
Polter's house; they slanted out in yellow shafts to the nearby white
ground. But for the rest, the whole place was dark, save a dim glow
from under the dome.

I shook my head at Alan's suggestion. "We couldn't land inside." We
had circled back and were a mile or so off toward the river. "You saw
guards down there. But that low stretch outside the gate on th