d
in the greatest organization of all, whose plant and methods must be up
to date in every particular. To be backward in a single particular may
mean disaster--may mean that the loss of thousands of lives is due to
you. You must have self-control, courage, dash, judgment If you have not
kept up, if you are not equal to the test, your inefficiency will mean
your shame and your country's suffering; while efficiency means a clear
conscience and your country's security."

Thus Partow turned the balance on the side of filial affection. He kept
watch of the boy, but without favoring him with influence. Young
Lanstron, who wanted to see results, had to earn them. He realized in
practice the truth of Partow's saying that there was nothing he had ever
learned but what could be of service to him as an officer. What the
acrobats had taught him probably saved his life on the occasion of his
first flight across the range. The friendships with all sorts of people
in his youth were the forerunner of his sympathy with the giant,
wall-eyed Stransky who had mutinied on the march.

"Finding enough work to do?" Par tow would ask with a chuckle when they
met in these days, for he had made Lanstron both chief of intelligence
and chief aerostatic officer. Young Colonel Lanstron's was the duty of
gaining the secrets of the Gray staff and keeping those of the Brown and
organizing up-to-the-moment efficiency in the new forces of the air.

He had remarked truly enough that the injury to his left hand served as
a better reminder against the folly of wool-gathering than a string,
even a large red string, tied around his finger. Thanks to skilful
surgery working ingeniously with splintered bone and pulpy flesh, there
was nothing unpleasant to the eye in a stiffened wrist and scarred
knuckles slightly misshapen. The fingers, incapable of spreading much,
were yet serviceable and had a firm grip of the wheel as he rose from
the aeroplane station on the Sunday morning after Marta's return home
for a flight to La Tir.

He knew the pattern weaving under his feet as one knows that of his own
garden from an overlooking window. Every detail of the staff map,
ravines, roads, buildings, battery positions, was stitched together in
the flowing reality of actual vision. No white posts were necessary to
tell him where the boundary between the two nations lay. The line was
drawn in his brain.

Nature was in a gracious humor, the very tree tops motionless. The