d was opening fire.

To and fro, like a trapped beast, the cigar-shaped airplane fled. Once
it seemed to escape. It faded from the edge of the black finger--faded
into nothingness amid a roar of execretion. Then it was caught and
held.

Truncated, bounded by an arc of sky, the black finger followed the
murderer in his flight remorselessly. And all around him the
anti-aircraft guns were placing a barrage of death.

He was trapped. No need for Dick to rush in to battle. To do so might
call off that deadly barrage that held the murderer in a ring of
death. Hovering, Dick watched. And then, perhaps panic-stricken,
perhaps rendered desperate, perhaps through sheer, wanton courage that
might have commanded admiration under nobler circumstances, the
airship turned and drove straight in the direction of the battery,
dropping another bomb as she did so.

* * * * *

It fell in a crowded street, swarming with spectators who had
clambered upon the fallen debris, and it wrought hideous destruction.
But this time there was hardly a cry--no unison of despair such as had
come to Dick's ears before. The suspense was too tense. All eyes
watched the airship as, seeming to bear a charmed life, she drove for
the White House itself, through a ring of shells that widened and
contracted alternately, with the object of placing a last bomb
squarely upon the building before going down in death. And all the
while the black searchlight held it.

Dick Rennell was to experience many thrilling moments afterward, but
there was never a period, measurable by seconds, yet seeming to extend
through all eternity--never a period quite so fraught with suspense
as, hovering there, he watched the flight of that silvery plane
speeding straight toward the executive mansion while all around it the
shells bloomed and spread. It was over the White House grounds. The
archies had failed; they were being outmaneuvered, they could not be
swung in time to follow the trajectory of the plane. Dick held his
breath.

Then suddenly the silvery ship dissolved in a blaze of fire, a shower
of golden sparks such as fly from a rocket, and simultaneously the
last bomb that she was to drop broke upon the ground below.

Down she plunged, instantly invisible as she escaped the finger of the
black beam; but she dropped into the vortex of ruin that she herself
had created. Into a pit of blazing fire, criss-crossed by falling
trees, that had engu