pared with the swiftness of the other!

But the great ship was slowing; it came on, but its wild speed was
checked. The light of the full moon showed plainly now what McGuire
had seen but dimly before--a great metal beak on the ship, pointed and
shining, a ram whose touch must bring annihilation to anything it
struck.

The squadron of planes made a group in the sky, and Blake's monoplane,
too, was with them. The huge enemy was approaching slowly: was it
damaged? McGuire hardly dared hope ... yet that raking fire might well
have been deadly: it might be that some bullets had torn and
penetrated to the vitals of this ship's machinery and damaged some
part.

It came back slowly, ominously, toward the circling planes. Then,
throwing itself through the air, it leaped not directly toward them
but off to one side.

* * * * *

Like a stone on the end of a cord it swung with inconceivable speed in
a circle that enclosed the group of planes. Again and again it
whipped around them, while the planes, by comparison, were motionless.
Its orbit was flat with the ground: then tilting, more yet, it made a
last circle that stood like a hoop in the air. And behind it as it
circled it left a faint trace of vapor. Nebulous!--milky in the
moonlight!--but the ship had built a sphere, a great globe of the gas,
and within it, like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron
were darting and whirling.

"Gas!" groaned the watching man: "gas! What is it? Why don't they
break through?"

The thin clouds of vapor were mingling now and expanding: they
blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale
iridescence from their billowing folds.

"Break through!" McGuire had prayed--and he stood in voiceless horror
as he saw the attempt.

The mist was touching here and there a plane: they were engulfed, yet
he could see them plainly. And he saw with staring, fear-filled eyes
the clumsy tumbling and fluttering of unguided wings as the great
eagles of the 91st fell roaring to earth with no conscious minds
guiding their flight.

The valleys were deep about the mountain, and their shadowed blackness
opened to receive the maimed, stricken things that came fluttering or
swooping wildly to that last embrace, where, in the concealing
shadows, the deeper shadows of death awaited....

* * * * *

There was a room where a telephone waited: McGuire sensed this but
dumbly,