They obeyed pronto, talking to each other continuously and with no one listening to anybody else. I had a sort of a kind of a plan of procedure staked out by the time I got down and faced the scaredest, whitest, most shaken-up sergeant in the American or any other army. “You’re sicker now, I presume,” I told him grimly. Marston could not speak. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he was a truly pitiful sight, I suppose, had I had room for any pity in my mind. I was about to launch forth on something, when one of the occasional sensible ideas I get seized the opportunity to make itself known to me. So I folded up my tongue and said curtly: “My elevator controls went bad on the take-off. Looks to me like Fernald’s went bad in the air, and it was just the grace of ---- he was over the water, and only a few feet high. Help me with this fuselage.” Marston, as I said, was like a man in a trance. His weakness seemed to have been effectually scared out of him, and he didn’t try to vomit once. Which gave me pause for thought, in itself. _He_ hadn’t been in my ship. * * * * * We looked at the elevators, which were absolutely undamaged. The control wires were attached to the little cabane struts above and below the great linen fins--but they hung loosely. Then I broke through the fuselage carefully, so that patching would be all that was necessary to repair it, and took a look inside. The tail-control cables go through the fuselage, and are not visible from the outside except at either end. In a very few minutes the evidence was all before me. The cables had been filed inside. Not completely through, but nearly. The object was clear. The few unfiled strands of the cables were sufficiently strong to hold and work the elevators when the ship was on the ground. But when it picked up speed, and one commenced to use the things with all the force of the propeller blast, plus the speed of the ship, acting against the surfaces, the cable was not strong enough to hold. I had been lucky, in a way, in that mine had been filed a bit too much and had broken before I was going at full speed. Les’ had given way over the river. It was my guess that the perpetrator of the thing had hoped that the cables would hold for a while, and give way during the trip some time when the ship was going at an unusually fast pace, getting underneath a cloud or something like that. It didn’t seem likely that he or they would want the wrecks to happen on the field.