This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

THE ENDING OF WAR

passed between them and the sun, and they looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot. "Shall we signal?" came a megaphone hail.

"Three bombs," they answered together.

"Where do they come from?" asked the megaphone.

The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the dead men. One of them had an idea. "Signal that first," he said, "while we look." They were joined by their aviators for the search, and all six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for some indication of identity. They examined the men's pockets, their bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the bodies over and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark. . . . Everything was elaborately free of any indication of its origin.

"We can't find out!" they called at last.

"Not a sign?"

"Not a sign."

"I'm coming down," said the man overhead. . . .

§ 7.

The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art-Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright little

189