"I'm going to telephone this minute and get a warrant for that fellow--trespass and assault--we'll see!" The little man was shaking with baffled rage and humiliated dignity. "Right in the middle of the fair green, too! How can we play that fifth hole, I'd like to know?" "I say, play it as 'ground under repair,'" panted Mr. Judson, who was just getting his breath. "'Ground under repair!'" echoed Mr. Tassifer scornfully. "There isn't any ground under repair. It's got to be played as 'a rub of the green!'" He glared furiously at Judson. "_Ground_ under repair!" repeated the other stubbornly. "Rub of the green!" shouted Mr. Tassifer. A sound of heavy footfalls came from behind them, and they turned to see the man from the flying machine coming up the steps. He had taken off his helmet and looked very pale and tired and quite tame. "Excuse me," he said huskily. "Can I telephone to the observatory from here? My name's Hooker and we've just come down from Ungava--five hours. Simply _had_ to land on your course--nowhere else! You couldn't let me have a cigarette, could you?" II The morning after the successful descent of the Flying Ring among the bunkers and hazards of the golf-course of the Chevy Chase Club, at Washington, Professor Benjamin Hooker awoke to find himself not only famous but, beyond peradventure, the most interesting human being upon the terrestrial globe. Equipped with a marvelous engine capable of navigating space and of discharging a lavender ray which could annihilate anything from a fleet of battle-ships to a mountain-range, he was justly acclaimed "The First Citizen of the World." He, or the nation to which he should give his allegiance, could, it was properly assumed, control the destinies of mankind. It had been universally known that the nations involved in the world-war had concluded a treaty of peace only under the threat of the mysterious being known as "Pax" to shift the axis of the globe and turn Europe into an arctic waste. It was now, therefore, generally believed that Hooker was himself none other than Pax, and that, having brought about the end of the war, he had returned with his aerial monster to pursue further scientific investigations under the auspices of the national government. At any rate, Professor Benjamin Hooker, hitherto the most modest of all the retiring inhabitants of Cambridge, Massachusetts, now found himself in the spotlight of publicity, and hailed not only as the arbiter of world-politics but as the dictator of human destiny. True to his instincts, however, Professor Hooker paid no attention to this surfeit of adulation. The day after his arrival, having reported himself at the office of the Secretary of State, he retired to the Congressional Library to prepare his statement for the Smithsonian Institution, and, having rented a hall bedroom in a quiet lodging-house on H Street, resumed the unpretentious existence of a scientific investigator.