What had happened? What was it that had come crashing down upon them from the sky, bringing destruction in its wake? This question Garry Grayson asked himself confusedly as he rubbed his bruised head and tried painfully to extricate himself from the mass of wreckage. He pulled one leg from beneath some boards and found with relief that he could move it. Encouraged by the test, he tried the other one. "Nothing broken," he muttered. Then, his head clearing, he looked around him fearfully for his companions. Rooster and Nick were emerging slowly, bewilderedly, from a pile of wreckage. Bill was sitting on the floor, head buried in his arms, so dazed that he did not know what was going on around him. All this Garry took in at a glance. And he saw also what it was that had crashed down upon them from the sky, almost completely demolishing Peeble's little cabin. For an airplane, or what remained of one, was perched upon the wreckage, its damaged wings half supported by the tough, bending boughs of trees on either side of the ruined hut. Garry looked about him for the pilot, and saw at some distance a pitiful, huddled figure that showed no signs of life. He staggered to his feet and was about to go to the aid of the unfortunate fellow when a horrible thought stopped him. Rooster and Nick were safe. Bill was rubbing his head as though his addled brains were getting ready to function again. But Ted Dillingham! Where was Ted? He was nowhere in sight. Garry rushed forward to a place where the timbers lay thickest, imagining Ted crushed, mangled, perhaps dead. Even as he did so, there came an explosion, and a darting, red flame shot out beneath the battered body of the airplane. Fire! And somewhere beneath the wreckage lay Ted at the mercy of the flames! Garry yelled hoarsely to his befuddled companions. "Ted is under there somewhere!" he cried. "Come on, boys! Work fast! We've got to get him out!" His chums' heads cleared like magic, and the boys worked with feverish haste while the fire crept ever closer. They called Ted's name over and over again as they tore at the rough boards, searching for him. At last came a faint answer, and their efforts were redoubled. At last they found Ted, pinned helplessly beneath a pile of boards, only his head visible! "Hurry, fellows, hurry!" cried Garry in agony. "Quick, before the fire gets at him!" Garry Grayson, now fourteen years old, had been born and brought up in Lenox, a thriving town with a population of about fifteen thousand. His father was Joseph S. Grayson, a prominent lawyer of the town and a leader in all its civic activities. Mrs. Grayson was a sweet, wholesome woman, intensely proud of her son Garry and his twin sister, Ella, a merry, pretty girl, whose chief delight was in teasing her brother, of whom, however, she was extremely fond. The family lived in a handsome home at the corner of Hill and Maple Streets in a choice residential section of Lenox.