Grunting and obviously short of breath the men trudged stolidly onwards for perhaps nearly two hundred yards. Once Norton thought fit to make a sudden effort and wriggle from his captors' grasp, but the attempt ended disastrously to himself. Brutally they bumped him upon the ground. The shock to the spinal system was excruciating, but it had the desired effect. The prisoner's spirit of resistance was broken; even the stern mandate, "Quiet, or you are a dead man," was unnecessary. The scarf or cloth that enveloped his head had slipped during the struggle. He could now see. Either his kidnappers had not noticed the fact or else they regarded it as of no consequence. He could discern the faces and upper portions of the bodies of the two men. They were tall burly fellows dressed in black oilskins. In spite of their powerful physique they were breathing stertorously; they reeked of petrol. Another fifty yards and they came to a halt. Norton turned his head and saw what appeared at first sight to be the dark grey body of a motorcar. It was quivering under the application of some unseen influence, yet there was no purr of internal mechanism to justify the belief that it possessed self-contained machinery. "Lash that schweinhund's ankles, Pfeil," ordered one of the fellows in German. "That is right; now do you enter first and I'll heave the English fool up so that you can get him inside." "Now is the dangerous time," commented his companion as he scrambled through a narrow aperture. "It is ever a dangerous time with us," rejoined the other gloomily. "Ah, yes; but now? Supposing the wire is insufficient to take the strain?" "It will bear thrice our total weight," replied the first speaker, "frail though it looks. No fear of that breaking. It is that highly-charged electric cable that worries me. We must have landed nearer to it than we should have done, yet it looks further away on the map." The fellow completed his difficult task of lifting Norton into the interior of the covered-in car--the observation room of a Zeppelin floating motionless five hundred feet or so overhead. The commander of the giant aircraft had successfully carried out a daring manoeuvre with the ultimate object of taking prisoner the man on whom his imperial master the "All-Highest" had set a price for his capture. Taking advantage of an almost imperceptible breeze and knowing his position to an almost dead certainty by means of exact cross-bearings afforded by three reservoirs, conspicuous even in the darkness, he had caused to be lowered the aluminium observation car.