rded the
council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July. But instead
he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and made various
arrangements for their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and
when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his
neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch's
mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a green
umbrella.

About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the
outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively
over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange
aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory
reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm of
consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before
the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down
among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find
an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then went round
into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of his
original pursuer.

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent
grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at the
wheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too
intent on getting away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after that
he must have heard shots. He let his engine go, he crouched down, and
for twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation of
a bullet. It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three great
planes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead
across his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset
or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last he was
curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields of
rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was
a village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable
bearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine
abruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he
came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him
as he fell.

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close