The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-08
(Continued.1
 CHAPTER ".

II
 was piece of a man, the head
 and shoulders of man that
 Hailed down into a ragged dark ness and pool of shining black
 And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crum bled, and rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that she was dragged downward.
 
 When the rather brutish young avia- tor with the bullet head and the black hair cropped Zen brosse'' who was in charge of the French special scientific corps heard presently of this disaster to the war control he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own that he laughed. Small matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at Caudebec, and the only sweetheart he had ever had-and it was poor love making then-was a girl in Rouen He slapped his second in command on the shoulder t'Now." he said there's nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them tit for tat. Strategy aNd reasons of state-they're over. Come along, my boy, and we'll Just show these old women what we can do when they let us have our heads"
 He spent five minutes telephoning, and then be went out into the court yard of ths chateau in which he had been instaned and shouted for his au- tomobile. Things would have to move quickly, because there was scarcely an hour and half before dawn. He look ed at the sky and noted with satisfac- tion a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east.
 He was young man of infinite shxewdness, and his material and aero planes were scattered all over the countryside, stuck away in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods 4 hawk could not have discovered any of them without coming within reach of "a gun. But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite prepared under kaT2aulin between two ricks notsa cou- pie of miles away. He was going to Berlin with that and just one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to do.
 He had in his hands the black com pIement to all those other gifts science was urging upon unregenerate man kind, the gift of destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type.
 Z He was a dark young man. with something negroid about his gleaning face. He smiled like one who is ia vored and anticipates great pleasures. There was an exotic richness. chuc- kling flavor, about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and except1onal- 1y big.
 wen give them tit for tat he said. wen give them tit for tat. No time to lose, boys"
 And presently over the cloud banks that lay above Westpha1ia and Sax ony the swift aeroplana, with its atomic engine as noiseless as dane- ing sunbeam and it's phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the central European i hosts.
 It did not soar very high. It skim med a few hundred feet above the banked darknesses of cunulus that hid 1 the world, ready to plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile hier range into vision. The 1 tense young steersman divided bis at- tention between the guiding stars above and the level. tumbled surfaces of the vapor strata that hid the world 1 below. Over great spaces those banks 1 lay as even as frozen lava flow and almost as still, and then they were 1 rent by ragged areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim | patches of the land below gleamed re motely through abysses- Once he saw quite distinctly the plan of big rail way station outlined in lamps and sig nalss and once the flames of burning [ rick showing nvfd through boiling | drift of smoke on the side of some great hiI1 But if the world was mask | ed it was alive with sounds Up through that vapor floor came the deep roar of trains. the whistles of horns of motorcars, a sound of rife fire away | to the south and as he drew near his destination the growing of cocks.
 The sky above the ind1stinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first starry and then paler, with a light that crept from north to east as the dawn came on. The Milky way was invisible in the blue and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steer ing wheel, darlxly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all concen- trated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin shaped box which con- tained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action. Hitherto carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in almost indnitesima1 quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great de struction slunllering in the hlack