ow to a
scene that made him forget affectation and effect. He started to run
toward the basket, shouting peremptory orders:

"Out of the car; out of the car instantly, madame! You are risking
your life."

His excitement infected the crowd. Surging, it seemed to sweep with it
the rider on the restive horse. For, as a hand was suddenly lifted in
the midst of the crowd the horse apparently overcame the legs braced to
spring, it shot forward directly at the balloon basket.

The hand that had been raised was the hand of Raymond Owen.

All was happening so swiftly that neither Harry nor Panatella reached
the basket before the maddened animal.

The crowd had given way in panic before it. Cries of fright were
mingled with cries of pain as the beast charged straight upon the men
holding the basket, felling and crushing them with shoulder and hoof.

For an instant a few desperate hands held to the wrenching car.
Panatella had all but reached the platform; Harry was within arm's
length of it, when, with a writhing twist the bag jerked the basket
sideways and upward, knocking to the ground the last two men who had
held it and whirling forth into the deathly emptiness of space a
cowering, stunned girl, whose white face peered and white hands pleaded
over the basket rim--peered down upon the upturned faces of thousands
who would have risked their lives to aid, but who stood helpless in
their pity, hushed in fear.

For a moment Harry had stood dazed. It was as if the twanging taut of
the ropes, as the bag tore almost from his grasp the most precious
being in the world, had snapped the fibers of action in him.

The daze passed quickly, but in the moment of its passing. The
balloon, risen now five hundred feet in the air, had swept its way
westward over a mile of ground.

Harry turned to look for his motor car. Standing as he was at the spot
from which the balloon had ascended, he now faced a human barricade.
With a shout of warning he charged at what seemed to be a vulnerable
point in the files of wedged shoulders. The wall resisted. The throng
was lost to all but the dimming view of the balloon. Harry swung right
and left with his broad shoulders. He tore his way through.

The car was standing where he had left it on the outskirts of the
field. As he approached it he saw Owen emerge from the crowd and hurry
toward a runabout that had just been driven upon the field.

"What's the matter?" yelled a man in the m