and the way to that room was long to his stumbling feet. He
was blinded: his mind would not function: he saw only those fluttering
things, and the moonlight on their wings, and the shadows that took
them so softly at the last.

One plane whistled close overhead. McGuire stopped where he stood to
follow it with unbelieving eyes. That one man had lived, escaped the
net--it was inconceivable! The plane returned: it was flying low, and
it swerved erratically as it flew. It was a monoplane: a new ship.

Its motor was silenced: it stalled as he watched, to pancake and crash
where the towering pines made a cradle of great branches to cushion
its fall.

No thought now of the colonel waiting impatiently for a report; even
the enemy, there in the sky was forgotten. It was Blake in that ship,
and he was alive--or had been--for he had cut his motor. McGuire
screamed out for Professor Sykes, and there were others, too, who came
running at his call. He tore recklessly through the scrub and
undergrowth and gained at last the place where wreckage hung dangling
from the trees. The fuselage of a plane, scarred and broken, was still
held in the strong limbs.

* * * * *

Captain Blake was in the cockpit, half hanging from the side. He was
motionless, quiet, and his face shone white and ghastly as they
released him and drew him out. But one hand still clung with a grip
like death itself to a hose that led from an oxygen tank. McGuire
stared in wonder and slowly gathering comprehension.

"He was fixed for an altitude test," he said dazedly; "this ship was
to be used, and he was to find her ceiling. He saw what the others
were getting, and he flew himself through on a jet of pure oxygen--"
He stopped in utter admiration of the quickness of thought that could
outwit death in an instant like that.

They carried the limp body to the light. "No bones broken so far as I
can see," said the voice of Professor Sykes. "Leave him here in the
air. He must have got a whiff of their devilish mist in spite of his
oxygen; he was flying mighty awkwardly when he came in here."

But he was alive!--and Lieutenant McGuire hastened with all speed now
to the room where a telephone was ringing wildly and a colonel of the
air force must be told of the annihilation of a crack squadron and of
a threat that menaced all the world.

* * * * *

In that far room there were others waiting where Colone