ng
of bombs and so forth, could also be compensated by admitting air to
sections of the general gas-bag. Ultimately that made a highly explosive
mixture; but in all these matters risks must be taken and guarded
against. There was a steel axis to the whole affair, a central backbone
which terminated in the engine and propeller, and the men and magazines
were forward in a series of cabins under the expanded headlike forepart.
The engine, which was of the extraordinarily powerful Pforzheim type,
that supreme triumph of German invention, was worked by wires from this
forepart, which was indeed the only really habitable part of the ship.
If anything went wrong, the engineers went aft along a rope ladder
beneath the frame. The tendency of the whole affair to roll was partly
corrected by a horizontal lateral fin on either side, and steering was
chiefly effected by two vertical fins, which normally lay back like
gill-flaps on either side of the head. It was indeed a most complete
adaptation of the fish form to aerial conditions, the position of
swimming bladder, eyes, and brain being, however, below instead of
above. A striking, and unfish-like feature was the apparatus for
wireless telegraphy that dangled from the forward cabin--that is to say,
under the chin of the fish.

These monsters were capable of ninety miles an hour in a calm, so that
they could face and make headway against nearly everything except
the fiercest tornado. They varied in length from eight hundred to two
thousand feet, and they had a carrying power of from seventy to two
hundred tons. How many Germany possessed history does not record, but
Bert counted nearly eighty great bulks receding in perspective during
his brief inspection. Such were the instruments on which she chiefly
relied to sustain her in her repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine and her
bold bid for a share in the empire of the New World. But not
altogether did she rely on these; she had also a one-man bomb-throwing
Drachenflieger of unknown value among the resources.

But the Drachenflieger were away in the second great aeronautic
park east of Hamburg, and Bert Smallways saw nothing of them in the
bird's-eye view he took of the Franconian establishment before they shot
him down very neatly. The bullet tore past him and made a sort of pop as
it pierced his balloon--a pop that was followed by a rustling sigh and
a steady downward movement. And when in the confusion of the moment he
dropped a ba