lood showed black against the crazy course he left behind
him; ages seemed to pass before he thrust his head over the top of the
bank, dug his chin into it and pulled onto level ground. Ages, but in
reality only seconds, and the whole Canal--America--lying at the mercy
of what each one of those seconds might unloose!

* * * * *

But the plane was near now, and it almost seemed that some unseen
force mightier than the strength of men hauled Chris's broken body to
it and up the stretch of its fuselage-side into the cockpit.

Ordinarily, he should have been delirious from the pain of jaw and
leg, but the controls of the plane were before him and he saw nothing
else. Wings and propeller were better than legs! He was in his
element: by the sixth sense of born airmen, he knew and could handle
any flying machine, no matter how foreign.

In a second, his fingers had fumbled onto the starting button. The
choke of the motor and then its full-throated roar were sweet to his
ears.

The lonely golf course and the night re-echoed with the bellow of
twelve pistons thrusting in line; watching, one would not have dreamed
that a cripple was at the controls of the plane that now swung around
with a blast of power, leveled its nose down the course and raced
smoothly over close-clipped grass. Its wheels bumped, spun on the
ground and lifted into air.

A mile to the dam! Istafiev's words came back to him. It would take
Kashtanov twenty minutes at least, for he would go cautiously. But how
long had passed--how long? That was the agonizing question.

Staring forward through the hurtling prop, the night rushed at him;
the dark hills melted away to either side; clear ground swept into
view and then a long black thread that was the spillway channel.
Behind was the bubbling, leaping flow of the spillway itself, and
Gatun Dam. The smooth cement sides were as yet unharmed.

"Thank God!" Chris muttered. "Now, where--where?"

A stream of light flowed out from the hydro-electric station on the
left side of the spillway channel. The opposite bank was bare, running
right up to the face of the dam beneath the spillway's seven gates.
There the box was to be placed. But from the air, the light was
uncertain, deceptive--and a little two-foot-square box was all he had
to go by!

"I can't see!" Chris said hoarsely. "I can't see!"

* * * * *

Like a roaring black meteor the plane hurtl