nto the air.

I have said Paul could fly; but the terrific flight of the screaming
thing that held us seemed beyond the power of man to control. I was
stunned with the thundering roar and the speed that held me down and
back against a cabin wall.

How he found Melford, I cannot know; but he found it as a homing
pigeon finds its loft. He checked our speed with a sickening swiftness
that made my brain reel. There were red ships above, but they let the
white ship pass unchallenged. There were no Red soldiers on the
ground--only the marks where they had passed.

From the distance came a never-ceasing thunder of guns. The village
was quiet. It still burned, blazing brightly in places, again
smouldering sluggishly and sending into the still air smoke clouds
whose fumes were a choking horror of burned flesh. There were bodies
in grotesque scattering about the streets; some of them were black and
charred.

Paul Stravoinski took me with him as he dashed for a house that the
flames had not touched. And I was with him as he smashed at the door
and broke into the room.

* * * * *

There was splintered furniture about. A cabinet, whose glass doors had
been wantonly smashed, leaned crazily above its fallen books, now
torn, scuffed and muddy upon the floor. Through a shattered window in
the bed-room beyond came a puff of the acrid smoke from outside to
strangle the breath in my throat. On the floor in a shadowed corner
lay the body of a woman--a young woman as her clotted tangle of golden
hair gave witness. She stirred and moaned half-consciously.... And the
lined face of Paul Stravoinski was a terrible thing to see as he went
stumblingly across the room to gather that body into his arms.

I had known Maida; I had seen their love begin in college days. I had
known a laughing girl with sunshine in her hair, a girl whose soft
eyes had grown so tenderly deep when they rested upon Paul--but this
that he took in his arms, while a single dry sob tore harshly at his
throat, this was never Maida!

There were red drops that struck upon his hands or fell sluggishly to
the floor; the head and face had taken the blow of a clubbed rifle or
a heavy boot. The eyes in that tortured face opened to rest upon
Paul's, the lips were moving.

"I told them of you," I heard her whisper. "I told them that you would
come--and they laughed." Unconsciously she tried to draw her torn clothing
about her, an instinctive re