There came that suffocating feeling now again. The tank was almost empty, would be gone in one more breath! Desperately, with strength born of panic, he sucked his lungs full. Then he bent his neck and raked his face against a rope that extended upward from the corner of the basket. His lungs seemed bursting; the mask still clung tenaciously on his face. He raked again, a grotesque movement, and the mask came halfway off. His head swam, reeled crazily; he wanted air--he had to breathe! He set his teeth hard over the cord that extended to the rip panel, bit hard down upon it, tried to jerk it with his head. He lost his balance, crumpled forward and lay, unconscious, on the basket floor. * * * * * In the deathlike silence of the upper air the rasping sigh of escaping hydrogen echoed hollowly. The huge bag of the _Marie IV_ crumpled slowly, collapsed, the bottom portion folding upward in the netting. It started down, gaining momentum rapidly. Air, passing through the ropes and rigging of the balloon, turned to howling, shrieks as speed was gathered. The _Marie_ fell three thousand feet while the hydrogen was going out. When the bag was empty it should have parachuted, but it did not. It folded up into a knot in the apex of the netting, like a huge fist, gnarled and bulging on one side. Helpless from the force of gravity, the derelict was falling at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, the cloth and netting whipping violently upward in a high-flung streamer. The figure in the bottom of the basket lay as it had fallen, crumpled grotesquely. The balloon plunged earthward at a constant speed now--air resistance was so great that it could gain no greater velocity. As it descended and reached denser air it even slowed a trifle, but still fell like a rock nearly three miles a minute. The flat plain of the clouds seemed to lift steadily up toward the basket of the balloon; the balloon itself seemed to drop but slowly. Then, at twenty thousand feet, the clouds enveloped it and there was no trace left of where the falling derelict had gone. * * * * * Kisner and Welkfurn, waiting at the club for hours now, were silent as the minutes passed and brought no word of Conway. At first there had been tense moments of angry denunciation from Kisner, a hysterical venting of his fears and feelings of impending evil. Welkfurn realized fully now the gravity of his failure to return in time with the clock. At first he made explanations hotly, told of his experiences in town, tried to pacify and allay Kisner’s agitation; but the other man would not listen.