ading about it in the papers. Well, Florence Levasseur was kidnapped
last night. I want to save her. What's your price?"

"Nothing."

"That's too much!"

"Perhaps, but the adventure amuses me. It will be an advertisement."

"Very well. But your silence is necessary until to-morrow. I'll buy it.
Here's twenty thousand francs."

Ten minutes later Don Luis was dressed in an airman's suit, cap, and
goggles; and an aeroplane rose to a height of two thousand five hundred
feet to avoid the air currents, flew above the Seine, and darted due west
across France.

Versailles, Maintenon, Chartres....

Don Luis had never been up in an aeroplane. France had achieved the
conquest of the air while he was fighting with the Legion and in the
plains of the Sahara. Nevertheless, sensitive though he was to new
impressions--and what more exciting impression could he have than
this?--he did not experience the heavenly delight of the man who for the
first time soars above the earth. What monopolized his thoughts,
strained his nerves, and excited his whole being to an exquisite degree
was the as yet impossible but inevitable sight of the motor which they
were pursuing.

Amid the tremendous swarm of things beneath them, amid the unexpected din
of the wings and the engine, in the immensity of the sky, in the infinity
of the horizon, his eyes sought nothing but that, and his ears admitted
no other sound than the hum of the invisible car. His were the mighty and
brutal sensations of the hunter chasing his game. He was the bird of prey
whom the distraught quarry has no chance of escaping.

Nogent-le-Rotrou, La Ferte-Bernard, Le Mans....

The two companions did not exchange a single word. Before him Perenna
saw Davanne's broad back and powerful neck and shoulders. But, by
bending his head a little, he saw the boundless space beneath him; and
nothing interested him but the white ribbon of road that ran from town
to town and from village to village, at times quite straight, as though
a hand had stretched it, and at others lazily winding, broken by a river
or a church.

On this ribbon, at some place always closer and closer, were Florence and
her abductor!

He never doubted it! The yellow taxi was continuing its patient and
plucky little effort. Mile after mile, through plains and villages,
fields and forests, it was making Angers, with Les Ponts-de-Drive after,
and, right at the end of the ribbon, the unattainable goal: Nantes,
Saint-Na