The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-06-25

situation which brought brighter light into the latter's boyish eyes.
 ''The point is," cried Manley, "could you get me there Could you make Q landing at night?"
 They were already on their feet again, running for the hangar.
 "Yes, can get you there! But what have we got to make a landing on?"
 "The main building of the Central Tower stops at the eighteenth story. That gives us flat roof of several hundred yards. Could you make 1t on that?"
 "Not unless 1t was lighted" ex- plained Evart, shouting for his mech anician as he rounded the gloomy corner of the hangar itself.
 "But 1t is lighted" Manley told him. Tt gets the light from the tower itself, and the whole cornice line is strung with electrics. the same as the Singer Building!"
 Evart's finger. touching a button, threw a white flood across the vaulted roof of the building. A touch on an- other button sent the great doors swinging open. Manley looked at his watch. Then he shook his head.
 Its too late," he proclaimed. But Evart and his mechanician were al- ready at work on the wide-winged monstrosity nestled under its metal roof like 0 pterodactyl in a cave.
 "Get aboard" commanded Evart. Were going to try for 1t, anyway" He turned to his helper, "Hey. Brown, throw my friend up that fur coat of yours!''
 "But what speed can you get out of this machine?" asked Manley as he clanbered aboard the chassis and struggled with his seat straps.
 Evart, who had been stooping over his engines looked up.
 T got one hundred and four an hour out of her this morning." he off-hand- edly announced. "But I think can push her up to one hundred and ten"
 Manley's heart beat faster.
 "Then there's chance!" he cried. "A fighting chance"
 A sudden sence of chill caused Man. ley to clutch for the fur coat thrown in at his feat, and struggle into 1t. As he did so the earth seemed sud- denly to fall away from him. Villages became spangled checker boards of lights. Highways became winding strings of pearls.
 Manley forgot the chilliness strik- ing into his bones. He forgot Mar gory Golden and Legar. He forgot the origin of his mission that brought him winging through the midnight heavens. He forgot the fact Of his own puny existence and the trivial ends to which it had been given over. All these he forgot completely and utterly until Evart, sweeping out along the twinkling shore lights of South Brooklyn, circled north again where the brazen figure of Liberty guarded the lower bay, and dropped lower along the tapering point of gloom where Battery Park posed like a ships prov into the tides of the Atlantic. They were still blaming down gently. like a settling bird, with the tilted planes veering a little west wcrd to escape the beetling sky scrapers along the canyon of Lower Broadway.
 Manley thought for moment that Evart had misjudged his position. Then he felt sure that Evart had also misjudged his height, that his stabilizing fin was already tco low to clear the fiat roof that abutted the light-strewn tower itself.
 But Evart obviously knew what he was about. For he took that ob- long of flat gloom outlined in elec- tries with gentle upward undula- tion like the upward swoop of blue- bird alighting on maple tree. Into that artful upward swoop was ab- sorbed much of their momentum, for Evart had plainly remembered that their running space was limited. But even with this precaution there re- mained perilous paucity of run way, for before the bounding and quivering organism of nickel and steel and canvas came to a stop it lurched head-on into wall of the tower itself.
 Manley could hear the crash of glass as the damper plane at the nose of the quivering chassis brought up short against one of the tower windows He was dimly aware of half-tumbling and half-climbing