traordinary announcement, transmitted from various European news
agencies, that an attempt had been made by the general commanding the
First Artillery Division of the German Army of the Meuse to violate the
armistice, had caused a profound sensation, particularly as the attempt
to destroy Paris had been prevented only by the sudden appearance of the
same mysterious Flying Ring that had shortly before caused the
destruction of the Atlas Mountains and the flooding of the Sahara Desert
by the Mediterranean Sea.

The advent of the Flying Ring on this second occasion had been noted by
several hundred thousand persons, both soldiers and non-combatants. At
about the hour of midnight, as if to observe whether the warring nations
intended sincerely to live up to their agreement and bring about an
actual cessation of hostilities, the Ring had appeared out of the north
and, floating through the sky, had followed the lines of the
belligerents from Brussels to Verdun and southward. The blinding yellow
light that it had projected toward the earth had roused the soldiers
sleeping in their intrenchments and caused great consternation all along
the line of fortifications, as it was universally supposed that the
director of its flight intended to annihilate the combined armies of
France, England, Germany, and Belgium. But the Ring had sailed
peacefully along, three thousand feet aloft, deluging the countryside
with its dazzling light, sending its beams into the casemates of the
huge fortresses of the Rhine and the outer line of the French
fortifications, searching the redoubts and trenches, but doing no harm
to the sleeping armies that lay beneath it; until at last the silence of
the night had been broken by the thunder of "Thanatos," and in the
twinkling of an eye the Lavender Ray had descended, to turn the village
of Champaubert into the smoking crater of a dying volcano. The entire
division of artillery had been annihilated, with the exception of a few
stragglers, and of the Relay Gun naught remained but a distorted puddle
of steel and iron.

Long before the news of the horrible retribution visited by the master
of the Ring upon Treitschke, the major-general of artillery, and the
inventor, Von Heckmann, had reached the United States, Bill Hood,
sitting in the wireless receiving station of the Naval Observatory at
Georgetown, had received through the ether a message from his mysterious
correspondent in the north that sent him hurrying