s
speckless and no sounds came from the Gratz farmhouse. Doubtless the
German officers quartered there were sleeping late, knowing that they
had no need to hurry to the front, since the fighting in the hills and
mountains was desultory.

But the crisp clear blue of the cold morning was wonderfully suitable to
the hosts of the air and they were at work. Along a battle front of five
hundred miles in the west and of seven or eight hundred in the east
messages were flashing, on wires by telephone and telegraph and then on
nothing but the pulsating air.

John, who had been compelled to deal so much with these invisible
agencies felt them now about him. He had a highly sensitive mind like a
photographic plate that registered everything, and when he opened the
window that he might see better and admit the fresh air, he did not have
to reach out for knowledge. It came, and registered itself upon that
delicate and imaginative mind. He had thought so much and he had striven
so hard to see and to divine what lay before him that he felt almost
able to send messages of his own through the air, messages of hope
winging their way directly to Julie.

The mind of man is a strange thing. It may be a godlike instrument, the
powers of which are yet but little known. John did not believe in the
least in anything supernatural, but he did believe in the immense and
unfathomed power of the natural. Alone, and in the early dawn with
silence all about him it seemed that he heard Julie calling to him. Her
voice traveled like the wireless on the pulsating air. She needed him
and she turned to him alone for aid. She had divined in some manner that
only he could help her and he would come, no matter what the risk. The
cry was registered again and again upon his sensitive soul, and always
he sent back the answer that he was coming. His mind, like hers, had
become a wireless, and both were working.

He became unconscious of time and place. He no longer saw the blue sky,
but he stretched out his arms and called:

"I am coming!"

"Coming? What do you mean by coming? Who is it you're telling?"

John came out of his dream, or the misty region between here and
nowhere, and turned to Jacques, who in the process of awakening at that
moment had heard his words which were spoken in French.

"I was just talking to the air," replied John a little uncertainly.
"Fine mornings appeal to me, and I was telling this one that I'd soon
come out into it"

Jac