"And he held it in his hand?"

"In the big paw that passed for a hand, yes!"

"All right! Now think carefully, Danny, and tell me: was there anything fastened to it—a wire, perhaps—a connection of some kind with the ground?"

O'Rourke stared at the pink and white face of the cherub who sat with him in the control room of a rocket-ship that threw itself like a red meteor across the high skies. "You're a bit of a devil, yourself," he said wonderingly at last. "How in the names of the Saints did you know? Yes, there was a wire, and I had forgotten it myself. It hung down, I remember, from the butt of the thing. But not to the ground. Infant—you missed it there; 'twas looped back like into the folds of the damn blue nightie he wore."

"And then went to the ground," said the Infant imperturbably, "—through his shoes most likely; or, if the robe was metal, that may have dragged on the ground instead."

He smiled seraphically at the bewildered pilot as he added: "That's all, Danny, for the present. Fly your little tin ship. I've got some heavy thinking to do."

Danny heard him ask one cryptic question, but he asked it as one who knows that only from his own brain can come the answer.

"How do they get rid of it?" the Infant was demanding. "If they stay in the air, how do they get rid of the load?"

And Pilot O'Rourke was glad enough to leave the answer to that one to the Infant. For had not the Infant alone seen the only reasonable answer to the puzzle of the mysterious man? And Danny had learned that it takes a real man and a real mind to track truth to her hiding place and accept the absurd improbabilities on which truth rests.

They were approaching their destination when the Infant opened his Cupid's-bow mouth to pronounce one additional question. "How high," he asked, "will your little tin ship fly? I know they've reached just under a hundred thousand experimentally, but how high will this one go?"

T

"And that's a question neither you nor I can answer, Infant." Danny was working with careful fingers at tiny levers; their control room was filled with whining whispers and thin shrieks. "We're goin' down now," he continued, and again flipped over the switch that would put him in communication with the Washington office of the A. F. F.

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