The terrors of the upper air

[Illustration: “They got poor Dexter. He went first, after we had enlarged the hole, and before he had dropped five hundred feet, the monsters were after him. He was helpless in the parachute.”]

Our knowledge of the upper air is very limited. The highest point a human being has ever ascended in a free balloon is about seven miles. What exists beyond this, we do not know. Our new author presents a very unusual, as well as complex situation, with a typical O. Henry ending. As to ourselves, we enjoyed the story hugely and the chances are that you will too.

THE TERRORS OF THE UPPER AIR

by Frank Orndorff

Pemberton, the Great Detective, renowned as never having failed to get his man, spoke to the Secretary of the President of the State Fair, and passed on to the President’s office door marked “Private.” He entered without knocking.

“Well! What happening is responsible for this visit?” The President sprang up and grasped Pemberton’s hand and pulled a chair out for him. “You are not in the habit of calling on me lately except on business. Who are the unlucky people at the Fair that you want? For my guess is that you are after some poor birds.”

Pemberton sat down and placed his hat on the President’s desk. “You are right to call them birds. I am after your human birds, and they can’t particularly be called ‘poor’--not now, anyhow.”

“What!” exclaimed the President, as he half rose in his seat, “surely you are not after Kidwell and Dexter, the aviators who are flying for the Fair.”

“The very two men I am after.”

“But what have they done? It must be something serious.”

“It is serious. You remember the Windsor Bank Robbery of over a week ago, where the cashier was killed and nearly a half a million dollars, mostly in large bills was stolen? The two men who did the job escaped in an auto. They were chased to a large wooded tract just about nightfall. When the pursuers closed in, they found the car but the men and the money were gone.”

“I remember that and also the mystery of their escape from the hundreds of men that surrounded the woods.”

“They did not escape through this fence of men, but over them. As soon as I had gone over the ground, I found tracks of where an aeroplane had made a short run in a break in the woods and could easily have shot upwards above the trees and away. The place was far enough from the edge of the woods, to enable the roar of the motor to go unheard as the two men fled away in the night.

“The run to the woods and the flight in the aeroplane was most likely planned ahead by the two men and would have remained undiscovered had it not been for a mark made in the soft ground by two small cuts in one of the aeroplane tires. It was one chance in a thousand that we ever found the aeroplane tracks and one in a million that it left the print of these two small cuts in the tire’s tread. Hundreds of aeroplanes are being driven across that part of the country each day and it would have been practically impossible to find the one that made the track if it had not been for the two small cuts. My men have informed me that the aeroplane of Kidwell and Dexter has a tire on it with two small cuts the same size and distance apart as the two marks left in the woods. I have just arrived and we expect to arrest the two aviators within the next few minutes. I thought I would notify you first, as I realize it will stop your exhibition flight for the Fair.”

“If these two men are murderers and robbers, as you state, I want you to arrest them at once--exhibition flight or no exhibition flight. You will have to hurry or wait until--listen--” The President broke off and turned his head to one side to hear better.