expense of perfecting your invention on the distinct understanding that when the time comes England shall have the option of sharing in it to the exclusion of all other countries except France. When you are ready we will officially invite the British Government to send a representative and will give them the opinion of coming in on equal terms. I do not think we can do more or less.”

So it was settled, and for many months Dick and Jules had toiled on the building of a new Mohawk whose performances far surpassed those of the machine lost in the Adriatic. It was now completed and its preliminary tests had satisfied them that they had forged a weapon of tremendous potency.

The machine was of the helicopter type. The idea, of course, was not new, but Dick had solved a problem which for many years had baffled inventors whose dream it was to construct a machine which should have the power of rising vertically from the ground and remaining stationary in the air.

Driven upward by powerful propellers placed horizontally underneath the body, the Mohawk was capable of rising from the ground at a tremendous speed. Once in the air the lifting propellers were shut off and the machine moved forward under the impulse of the driving screws placed in the front and rear. These screws were the secret of Dick Manton’s triumph. They were of a new design, giving a tremendous ratio of efficiency. In size they wore relatively tiny, but possessed far greater power than any propeller known. The machine itself was nearly square. The body was completely covered by the big, single plane, measuring about twenty feet each way. This was the outside size of the machine and so perfectly was the helicopter controlled that Dick had repeatedly brought it to earth in a marked space not more than thirty-two feet square.

Fitted with the new silencer which Dick had discovered and applied to the old Mohawk with such signal success, the engine was practically noiseless. At high speed the tiny propellers emitted only a thin, wailing note, barely audible a few yards away. Time and again Dick had sailed on dark nights only a few feet above the house roofs of Paris and had found that the noise of the ordinary traffic was amply sufficient to prevent his presence being discovered.

To ensure absolute secrecy the various parts of the machine had been made in widely separated districts of France, and had been brought from Paris to Veneux Nadon, where Dick and Jules had carried out the erection of the machine alone. The very existence of the new aeroplane was utterly 

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