little plane was dark, and amid the sounds of this night blizzard
our muffled engine couldn't be heard.

Alan touched me. "There are his lights; see them?"

We had passed St. Anne. The hills lay ahead--a wild mountainous country
stretching northward to the foot of Hudson Bay. The blizzard was roaring
out of the North and we were heading into it. I saw, on what seemed like
a dome-shaped hill perhaps a thousand feet above the river level, a
small cluster of lights which marked Polter's property.

"Fly over it once, George," Alan said. "Low--we can chance it. And find
a place to land near the walls."

We presently had it under us. I held the plane at five hundred feet, and
cut our speed to the minimum of twenty miles an hour facing the gale,
though it was sixty or seventy when we turned. There were a score or two
of hooded ground lights. But there was little reflection aloft, and in
the murk of the snowfall I felt we could escape notice.

We crossed, turned and went back in an arc following Polter's curved
outer wall. We had a good view of it. A weird enough looking place, here
on its lonely hilltop. No wonder the wealthy "Frank Rascor" had attained
local prominence!

The whole property was irregularly circular, perhaps a mile in diameter
covering the almost flat dome of the hilltop. Around it, completely
enclosing it, Polter had built a stone and brick wall. A miniature of
the Great Wall in China! We could see that it was fully thirty feet high
with what evidently were naked high-voltage wires protecting its top.
There were half a dozen little gates, securely barred, with doubtless a
guard at each of them.

Within the walls there were several buildings: a few small stone houses
suggesting workmen's dwellings; an oblong stone structure with smoke
funnels which looked like a smelter; a huge domelike spread of
translucent glass over what might have been the top of a mineshaft. It
looked more like the dome of an observatory--an inverted bowl fully a
hundred feet wide and equally as high, set upon the ground. What did it
cover?

And there was Polter's residence--a castlelike brick and stone building
with a tower not unlike a miniature of the Chateau Frontenac. We saw a
stone corridor on the ground connecting the lower floor of the castle
with the dome, which lay about a hundred feet to one side.

Could we chance landing inside the wall? There was a dark, level expanse
of snow where we could have done it, but our desc