"No joke.... You wouldn't think it was a joke if you saw my man Mullens. Somebody hit him on the nose with a sledgehammer. Found him tied up in a bundle and dumped in a corner, and blood all over the shop.... This morning. Went down about nine o'clock to sort of look at things. Door was locked. I thought Mullens was off on a bat, and then when I looked inside and saw the machine was gone, I thought he'd gone crazy. He couldn't fly a kite.... Machine clean gone. Then I heard a miawing in one of the lockers, and there was Mullens, all in, with enough waste stuffed in his mouth to choke an elephant. I yanked him out and turned him loose and asked him what was the answer. He said he was reading the paper about ten last night and somebody hammered on the door. Mullens opened it, and before he could sniff the air he got that wallop on the nose. Next he knew a couple of boys were sitting on him and stuffing waste in his mouth. They stuffed him in the locker-room and shut the door, and then in a couple of hours he heard them run the machine out, start the motor, and breeze off.... And that's all. Just clean vanished, going straight up, as near as I can find out. Nobody seems to have seen them or heard them. Not a darn trace.... Now wouldn't that get you?" "Is this real stuff, Matthews? You aren't planting any sort of joke?" "It's so dam real that I'll pay a little reward of five thousand bucks to the boy that brings the machine back again," Matthews said. "Hard luck," said Potter. "But why the devil should anybody steal an aeroplane? A white elephant would be as easy to hide, and they couldn't sell it. Get pinched the minute they tried that. I don't get the idea." "Didn't somebody steal a jail once?" Eldredge asked. "Did they leave anything behind?" Potter asked, "anything for the police to smell of and run off on the trail?" "We haven't found a burnt match that Mullens couldn't account for. It was a clean job. They just appeared--and then--" He whistled and waved his hand. "What do the police have to offer?" Matthews looked disgusted. "I don't think they believe I ever had an aeroplane," he said. "If 'planes get as common as automobiles," said O'Mera, who had strolled up, "the police will have to have a flying squadron of Zeppelins outfitted with enormous butterfly-nets. Some game that, eh? Chasing a stolen aeroplane a few thousand feet above ground and snaffling it in a bug-net." "You fellows are joshing me," Matthews complained. "You wouldn't be so darn funny if somebody had run off with twenty thousand dollars of yours." "Maybe the Kaiser's army of German reservists who were going to seize the country have grabbed it?" "You fellows make me sick," Matthews said, walking away in disgust, followed by a laugh.