om, for it seemed to him
that it meant considerable to try to discover who had sent the message
by such a strange channel.

Jack pondered. Then all at once he looked up with a light in his eyes.

"You've thought of something!" exclaimed the other pilot eagerly.

"Well, it might be possible, although I hardly believe she'd be the one
to go to such trouble. Still, she had children, she told me, at her home
in Lorraine, back of Metz; and this is a child's toy, this little
hot-air balloon."

"Do you mean that woman you assisted a week or so ago? Mrs. Neumann?"
asked Tom, quickly.

"Yes, it was only a little thing I was able to do for her, but she
seemed grateful, and said she hoped some day to be in a position to
repay the favor. Then later on I learned she had secured permission to
cross over to the German lines, in order to get to her family. She is a
widow with six children, you know, a native of Lorraine, and caught by
accident in one of the sudden furious rushes of the French, so that she
had been carried back with them when they retreated. At the time she had
been serving as a Red Cross nurse among the Germans. It was on that
account the French allowed her to return to her family. They are very
courteous, these French."

Tom was listening. He nodded his head as though it seemed promising at
least.

"Let's figure it out," he mused. "Which way was the wind coming from
last night, do either of you happen to know?"

"Almost from the north," the other aviator instantly responded. "I
chanced to notice that fact, for other reasons. But then it was almost
still, so the little balloon could not have drifted many miles before
the heavy atmosphere dragged it down until finally it landed in the
field."

"Well, that settles one thing," asserted Tom. "It came from back of the
German lines, don't you see?"

"Yes, that seems probable," admitted Jack.

"Your unknown friend was there at the time," continued Tom, in his
lawyer-like way, following up the trail he had started; "and hence
apparently in a position to know that some sort of plot was being
engineered against one Jack Parmly. Don't ask me why _you_ should
be selected for any rank treachery, because I don't know."

"And this person, this unknown friend of mine," Jack added, "wishing to
warn me so that I might not meet a bad end to-day, sent out this message
in the hope that it might fall back of our lines and be picked up. Tom,
it makes me have a queer feeling.