the Air Police, and should any machine be about on lawful business the noise of their engines would prevent the detectors picking up the throbbing whirr of the propeller, which, of course, could not be absolutely silenced.

Fortune favoured them. As they drew nearer to Lympne, swinging in from the slightly easterly course he had set, Dick caught sight of the navigation lights of the big mail aeroplane heading from London to Paris. His own machine, bearing, of course, no lights, was far above the stranger, the thunder of whose big engines came clearly up to them. A couple of red flares from the big plane signalled her code to the aerodrome, the searchlight blinked an acknowledgment, and the mail plane tore swiftly onward. Dick could not match its hurtling speed, but he followed along its track, confident that he would now be undetected.

They swept silently above the brilliantly lighted aerodrome, then across the Channel, and just as dawn was breaking detected the Triel forest, and dropped lightly to earth almost alongside Yvette’s machine. By eight o’clock the machine, now a motor-car, was safely locked up in a disused stable in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and Dick, Jules, and Yvette were soon in deep consultation.

That evening, just as dusk was falling, a half-drunken coachman sprawled lazily on a bench set against a wall in the deep courtyard of the “Baton d’Or,” a quiet hotel located in aback street in the market quarter of Paris. By his side was a bottle of vin blanc. Before him, harnessed to a dilapidated carriage, stood his horse, a dejected-looking animal enough.

Directly over his head, at a window of a room on the third floor, two men stood talking. One of them was Otto Kranzler.

Two rooms away, on the same floor, a curious little drama was being enacted.

Lounging on a sofa near the door was Dick Manton. Yvette, on a chair drawn near the window, faced him.

Yvette rang the bell, and the two were talking when a chambermaid appeared.

“Coffee and cognac for two,” Yvette ordered.

A few minutes later the girl reappeared. She crossed the room with a tray and set it on the table in front of Yvette.

As the maid turned Dick’s arm was slipped round her, and a chloroformed pad was pressed swiftly over her face. Taken utterly by surprise, the girl was too firmly held to do more 

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