t guns
and we've arranged it so far--but there've been a few deaths and a
great many prisoners. Not that we mind _that_, you know, father
and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there's always the
chance that some time we won't be able to arrange it."

Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the green moon's
heaven, were passing the green moon like precious Eastern stuffs
paraded for the inspection of some Tartar Khan. It seemed to John that
it was day, and that he was looking at some lads sailing above him in
the air, showering down tracts and patent medicine circulars, with
their messages of hope for despairing, rock-bound hamlets. It seemed
to him that he could see them look down out of the clouds and
stare--and stare at whatever there was to stare at in this place
whither he was bound--What then? Were they induced to land by some
insidious device to be immured far from patent medicines and from
tracts until the judgment day--or, should they fail to fall into the
trap, did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp round of a splitting
shell bring them drooping to earth--and "upset" Percy's mother and
sisters. John shook his head and the wraith of a hollow laugh issued
silently from his parted lips. What desperate transaction lay hidden
here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Croesus? What terrible and
golden mystery?...

The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and, outside the Montana
night was bright as day the tapestry brick of the road was smooth to
the tread of the great tyres as they rounded a still, moonlit lake;
they passed into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and
cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn, and John's
exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous with Percy's taciturn "We're
home."

Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite chateau rose from the
borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an
adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in
translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of
pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets,
the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs
and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of
the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on
John's spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the
tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights