“I’m trying my best,” I told him. “What happened after I passed out?” “Marston got you out of the seat and took the wheel before your ship crashed. He was ---- badly wounded himself, an artery severed, for one thing, but he flew the ship with one hand and held a handkerchief to your chest with another, flew back to Cleveland and landed. That Martin came in like a drunken duck, and he cracked the landing gear all to ----, then fainted in the ship.” “Is he alive?” “Sure. But he’d about bled to death when he got here, and you’d have been as dead as the free silver issue if he hadn’t----” “Well I’ll be ----!” was all that I could think of to say, and Les assured me that I was that already. “Where’s the sarge now?” was my next question. “Oh, he got his strength back quick--wounds weren’t as bad as yours--and he’s in the hospital at Langham now.” “Well, have the sleuths unearthed anything?” “Plenty, but not all,” big, serious Tolley told me. “One of the men in the Jenny that fought you was alive, but he wouldn’t say a word. They’ve arrested three more, though. Don’t know whether what they’ve said so far is right.” “Come on--get out of here!” my jovial doctor interrupted at this stage, coming into the room. “Slim’s still weak as a cup of tea. Tell him tomorrow, whatever it is.” Before I left the hospital Les, who visited me every trip, told me confidentially all that had happened. Hold your breath now, and prepare. I suppose you think that at the very least you’re about to hear that all the countries of the world got together and concentrated their nefarious master-spies in Cleveland and Boundville, bent on the destruction of the American Air Service. Well, they didn’t. There is no international ephillipsoppenheiming about to be indulged in by me. With that out, you figure big business. It is always proper to blame Wall Street for everything from the earthquake in Japan to the fact that it didn’t rain in the wheat-belt during July. Well, that’s out, too. You might know that anything I was connected with would turn out to be a farce-comedy eventually. I had to lay back in my bed and laugh myself sick again when I heard it. If there’d been any bullets left in my carcass they’d have clinked together like a castenets. The fact of the matter was that a wealthy, gentle, gray-haired old nut inventor--a man who’d evidently gone crazy trying to get a perpetual motion machine or something like that--was really responsible for the whole thing. He’s safely ensconced in a lunatic asylum now, working on a mechanical flyswatter or something like that. The facts are approximately as follows: