ich had been lost. Wrecked, no
doubt, and the small crew aboard it all killed. The vessel, however,
was not greatly damaged: the crew were killed doubtless by escaping
poisonous gases when the flyer struck.

How long it lay unfound, I cannot say. Perhaps, for days, it still
maintained its invisibility, while the frantic planes of the U. S.
Anti-War Department tried in vain to locate it. And then, with its
magnetic batteries exhausting themselves, it must have become visible.
Perona, making a solo flight upon Nareda business to Great London,
came upon it. Perona, Spawn and De Boer were then in the midst of
their smuggling activities. They salvaged the vessel secretly. De
Boer, with an incongruous flair for mechanical science, was enabled in
his bandit camp, to recondition the flyer--building a workshop for the
purpose, with money which Perona freely supplied.

Some of this I learned from De Boer, some is surmise: but I am sure it
is close to the facts.

* * * * *

I have since had an opportunity--through my connection with this
adventure which I am recording--of going aboard one of the X-flyers of
the Anti-War Department, and seeing it in operation with its technical
details explained to me. But since it is so important a Government
secret, I cannot set it down here. The principles involved are
complex: the postulates employed, and the mathematical formulae
developing them in theory, are far too intricate for my understanding.
Yet the practical workings are simple indeed. Some of them were
understood as far back as 1920 and '30, when that pioneer of modern
astrophysics, Albert Einstein, first proved that a ray of light is
deflected from its normal straight path when passing through a
magnetic field.

I am sorry that I cannot give here more than this vague hint of the
workings of the fantastic invisible flyers which to-day are so often
the subject of speculation by the general public which never has seen
them, and perhaps never will. But I think, too, that a lengthy
pedantic discourse here would be out of place. And tiring. After all,
I am trying to tell only what happened to me in this adventure. And to
little Jetta.

A very strangely capable fellow, this young De Boer. A modern pirate:
no other age could have produced him. He did not spare Perona's money,
that was obvious. From his hidden camp he must have made frequent
visits to the great Highland centers, purchasing scientific eq