fellow of about
thirty years, his features white and set in the agony of death.

He was dressed in a trim uniform of black, with silver braid, and on
his shoulders were the insignia of a lieutenant. He opened his eyes,
blue as the skies, and stared about him. He seemed to understand what
had happened to him.

"Dogs!" he muttered.

Shrieks of fury answered him. The mob surged toward him as if to grind
his face to pieces under their feet--and then recoiled, mouthing and
gibbering. But it was at Dick that they were looking, not at the dying
man.

He raised himself upon one elbow with a mighty effort. "His Majesty
the Invisible Emperor! Long be his reign triumphant!" he chanted. It
was his last credo. The words broke from his lips accompanied by a
torrent of red foam. His head dropped back, his body slipped down; he
was gone. And no one seemed to observe his passing. They were all
screaming and gibbering at Dick.

"Rennell! Rennell!" yelled Stopford. "Where are you, Rennell? God,
man, what's happened to your legs?"

Dick looked down at himself. For a moment he had the illusion that he
was a head and a trunk, floating in the air. His lower limbs had
become invisible, except for patches of trousering that seemed to
drift through space. The mob in the room had fallen back gaping at him
in horror.

Then Dick understood. It was the invisible garment that had coiled
itself about him. He tore it from him and became visibly a man once
more.

Shouts from another room! A surging movement of the crowd toward it.
The muffled sounds of an automatic pistol, fitted with a silencer!
Then screams:

"The devils are in there! They're murdering the soldiers!"

There followed a panic-stricken rush, more muffled firing, and then
the sharp roar of rifles, and the fall of plaster. Some one was
bawling the President's name. The rooms became a mass of milling human
beings, lost to all self-control.

A bedlam of noise and struggle. Men fought with one another blindly,
cursing soldiers fired promiscuously among the mob, riddling the
walls, stabbing at the air. The plaster was falling in great chunks
everywhere, filling the rooms with a heavy white cloud, in which all
choked and struggled. The yells of the civilian mob below, struggling
helplessly in the packed crowd that wedged the great stairway, made
babel. Outside the White House a dense mob that filled the lawns was
yelling back, and struggling to gain admittance. Suddenly the lig