by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holding
their light rifles in their hands towards the debris and the two dead
men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine
had broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the ears
of a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter.

These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their
captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and broken
amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by a
country pathway.

'By God,' cried the first. 'Here they are!'

'And unbroken!' said the second.

'I've never seen the things before,' said the first.

'Bigger than I thought,' said the second.

The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and then
turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddy
place among the green stems under the centre of the machine.

'One can take no risks,' he said, with a faint suggestion of apology.

The other two now also turned to the victims. 'We must signal,' said the
first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they looked up
to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot. 'Shall we signal?'
came a megaphone hail.

'Three bombs,' they answered together.

'Where do they come from?' asked the megaphone.

The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the
dead men. One of them had an idea. 'Signal that first,' he said, 'while
we look.' They were joined by their aviators for the search, and all
six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for
some indication of identity. They examined the men's pockets, their
bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the bodies
over and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark. . . . Everything
was elaborately free of any indication of its origin.

'We can't find out!' they called at last.

'Not a sign?'

'Not a sign.'

'I'm coming down,' said the man overhead....

Section 7

The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art Nouveau
palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright little
capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunning, and now
full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind them the window opened into
a large room, richly decorated in aluminium and crimson enamel, across
which the king, as he glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a