of the
blue indistinctness of the landfall. With the daylight he experienced an
intolerable fatigue.

He lifted weary eyes to the pink flush in the sky, yawned immensely, and
crawled back whispering to himself across the cabin to the locker. He
did not so much lie down upon that as fall upon it and instantly become
asleep.

There, hours after, sprawling undignified and sleeping profoundly,
Kurt found him, a very image of the democratic mind confronted with the
problems of a time too complex for its apprehension. His face was
pale and indifferent, his mouth wide open, and he snored. He snored
disagreeably.

Kurt regarded him for a moment with a mild distaste. Then he kicked his
ankle.

"Wake up," he said to Smallways' stare, "and lie down decent."

Bert sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"Any more fightin' yet?" he asked.

"No," said Kurt, and sat down, a tired man.

"Gott!" he cried presently, rubbing his hands over his face, "but
I'd like a cold bath! I've been looking for stray bullet holes in the
air-chambers all night until now." He yawned. "I must sleep. You'd
better clear out, Smallways. I can't stand you here this morning. You're
so infernally ugly and useless. Have you had your rations? No! Well, go
in and get 'em, and don't come back. Stick in the gallery...."

5

So Bert, slightly refreshed by coffee and sleep, resumed his helpless
co-operation in the War in the Air. He went down into the little gallery
as the lieutenant had directed, and clung to the rail at the extreme end
beyond the look-out man, trying to seem as inconspicuous and harmless a
fragment of life as possible.

A wind was rising rather strongly from the south-east. It obliged the
Vaterland to come about in that direction, and made her roll a
great deal as she went to and fro over Manhattan Island. Away in the
north-west clouds gathered. The throb-throb of her slow screw working
against the breeze was much more perceptible than when she was going
full speed ahead; and the friction of the wind against the underside of
the gas-chamber drove a series of shallow ripples along it and made
a faint flapping sound like, but fainter than, the beating of ripples
under the stem of a boat. She was stationed over the temporary City Hall
in the Park Row building, and every now and then she would descend
to resume communication with the mayor and with Washington. But the
restlessness of the Prince would not suffer him to remain for long in
any one pl