moment in the history of warfare, a moment that they would all remember
to their dying day.

XII

The shabby-genteel little houses of the Appian Way, in Cambridge, whose
window-eyes with their blue-green lids had watched Bennie Hooker come
and go, trudging back and forth to lectures and recitations, first as
boy and then as man, for thirty years, must have blinked with amazement
at the sight of the little professor as he started on the afterward
famous Hooker Expedition to Labrador in search of the Flying Ring.

For the five days following Thornton's unexpected visit Bennie, existing
without sleep and almost without food save for his staple of
ready-to-serve chocolate, was the centre of a whirl of books,
logarithms, and calculations in the University Library, and constituted
himself an unmitigated, if respected, pest at the Cambridge Observatory.
Moreover--and this was the most iconoclastic spectacle of all to his
conservative pedagogical neighbours in the Appian Way--telegraph boys on
bicycles kept rushing to and fro in a stream between the Hooker
boarding-house and Harvard Square at all hours of the day and night.

For Bennie had lost no time and had instantly started in upon the same
series of experiments to locate the origin of the phenomena which had
shaken the globe as had been made use of by Professor von Schwenitz at
the direction of General von Helmuth, the Imperial German Commissioner
for War, at Mainz. The result had been approximately identical, and
Hooker had satisfied himself that somewhere in the centre of Labrador
his fellow-scientist--the discoverer of the Lavender Ray--was conducting
the operations that had resulted in the dislocation of the earth's axis
and retardation of its motion. Filled with a pure and unselfish
scientific joy, it became his sole and immediate ambition to find the
man who had done these things, to shake him by the hand, and to compare
notes with him upon the now solved problems of thermic induction and of
atomic disintegration.

But how to get there? How to reach him? For Prof. Bennie Hooker had
never been a hundred miles from Cambridge in his life, and a journey to
Labrador seemed almost as difficult as an attempt to reach the pole. Off
again then to the University Library, with pale but polite young ladies
hastening to fetch him atlases, charts, guidebooks, and works dealing
with sport and travel, until at last the great scheme unfolded itself to
his mind--the sche