ble
reports and excuse them. We have much to discuss...."

* * * * *

Captain Blake took McGuire's arm as they went out into the night. And
he drew him away where they walked for silent minutes by themselves.
The eyes of Lieutenant McGuire roamed upward to the scudding clouds
and the glimpse of far, lonely stars; he stumbled occasionally as he
walked. But for Captain Blake there was thought only of matters
nearby.

"The old fox!" he exclaimed. "Didn't he 'sic us on' neatly? If we mix
it with that stranger there will be no censure from the Secretary of
War."

"I assumed that was who it was," said McGuire. "Well, they have
something to think about, that bunch; something to study over....
Perhaps more than they know.

"And that's their job," he concluded after a silence. "I'm going to
bed; but I would like a leave of absence to-morrow if that's O. K."

"Sure," said Captain Blake, "though I should think you would like to
stick around. Perhaps we will see something. What's on your mind,
Mac?"

"A little drive to the top of Mount Lawson," said Lieutenant McGuire.
"I want to talk to a bird named Sykes."

CHAPTER II

Lieutenant McGuire, U. S. A., was not given as a usual thing to vain
conjectures, nor did his imagination carry him beyond the practical
boundaries of accepted facts. Yet his mind, as he drove for hours
through the orange-scented hills of California, reverted time and
again to one persistent thought. And it was with him still, even when
he was consciously concentrating on the hairpin turns of Mount
Lawson's narrow road.

There was a picture there, printed indelibly in his mind--a picture of
a monstrous craft, a liner of the air, that swung its glowing lights
in a swift arc and, like a projectile from some huge gun, shot up and
up and still up until it vanished in a jet-black sky. Its altitude
when it passed from sight he could not even guess, but the sense of
ever-increasing speed, of power that mocked at gravitation's puny
force, had struck deep into his mind. And McGuire saw plainly this
mystery ship going on and on far into the empty night where man had
never been.

No lagging in that swift flight that he had seen; an acceleration that
threw the ship faster and yet faster, regardless of the thin air and
the lessened buoyancy in an ocean of atmosphere that held man-made
machines so close to Earth. That constant acceleration, hour after
hour, day after day--the spe