"And that's what we've got to find."

The police and soldiers were only too willing to assist Tom in his
search for his father. The ruins, they said, would be carefully gone
over in an endeavor to get a piece of the German shell to ascertain its
nature and the kind of gun that fired it. During that search some trace
might be found of Mr. Raymond.

It did not take long to establish one fact--that the inventor's body was
not among the dead carried out. Nor was he numbered with the injured in
the hospitals. Careful records had been kept, and no one at all
answering to his description had been taken out or cared for.

And yet, of course, there was the nerve-racking possibility that he
might have been so terribly mutilated that his body was beyond all human
semblance. The place where his room had been was a mass of splintered
wood and crumbled masonry. There was none of his effects discernible,
and Tom did not know what to think.

"We've just got to wait," he said to Jack, late that afternoon, when
their search of the hospitals and morgues had ended fruitlessly.

Meanwhile the French airmen had been scouring the sky for a sight of the
German craft that might have released the death-dealing bombs on the
city. But their success had been nil. Not a Hun had been sighted, and
one aviator went up nearly four miles in an endeavor to locate a hostile
craft.

Of course it was possible that a super-machine of the Huns had flown
higher, but this did not seem feasible.

"There is some other explanation of the bombardment of Paris, I'm sure,"
said Tom, as he and Jack went to their lodgings. "It will be a surprise,
too, I'm thinking, and we'll have to make over some of our old ideas and
accept new ones."

"I believe you're right, Tom. But say, do you remember that fellow we
saw in the train--the one I thought was a German spy?"

"To be sure I remember him and his _metzel suppe_. What about him? Do
you see him again?" and Tom looked out into the street from the window
of their lodging.

"No. I don't see him. But he may have had something to do with shelling
the city."

"You don't mean he carried a long-range gun in his pocket, do you,
Jack?" and Tom smiled for the first time since the awful tragedy.

"No, of course not. Still he may have known it was going to happen, and
have come to observe the effect and report to his beastly masters."

"He'd be foolish to come to Paris and run the chance of being hit by his
own shells