He hung up, swore in profound perplexity, then shrugged into his whipcord coat and went downstairs to the garage.

He got into the sedan, an immense, gleaming thing built specially in the shops of the Besson Motors Company, and sent it out of the wide doors of the garage and down the graveled lane to the portico of the Besson mansion.

He got out of the car and waited respectfully for the master to appear. But while he waited, with a bemused scowl, he felt the radiator.

It was quite warm. The car had been used recently.

Besson came out of the door, followed by a footman who carried a small bag and a briefcase. Besson was a short man, heavy set, inclined to rather loud checked suits which would have looked humorous on his squat frame had it not been for the quiet, tremendous power lying obviously in eye and Jaw. No one laughed after looking into the motor magnate's face!

"Everything ready?" said Besson.

"Yes, sir." nodded the chauffeur.

Once more he seemed to be on the verge of saying something further, but once more he repressed himself.

Besson got into the car. The footman put the bag and case in the rear. Besson nodded bruskly to the two servants, and sent the great machine out of the drive and swirling onto the street with the practiced rapidity that was still his after his early years as a race-track driver before he made his money. The sedan hummed out of sight in an incredibly short time.

Carlisle turned to the footman. In the chauffeur's eyes was something like fear, and small beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!" he said.

"What's up?" asked the footman.

"The boss!" "Either he's going crazy - or I am."

"Why?"

"An hour ago," explained Carlisle, "the chief came out to the garage. I was washing down the town car. He called to me to ask if the sedan was checked, and I said it was. He got into it and drove out of the garage with it. He had a bag, and I thought he was starting his Cleveland trip then. It seemed kind of funny that he came out to the garage himself for the car instead of having me bring it around, but I didn't pay too much attention to it."

"He started out an hour ago, with a bag?" said the footman, staring. "That's funny."

"It isn't funny as what happened next." Carlisle said. "In twenty five minutes I heard a car roll into the garage - I was upstairs in my rooms. I came down, and there was the sedan. So I figured the boss had changed his mind and wasn't going to Cleveland after all.

"I went back upstairs, and three minutes ago, I'll be d.a.m.ned if he didn't phone out, ask if the sedan was checked, and tell me to bring it around to the side door here - just as if he hadn't been out in that thing, himself, a little while ago and knew it was checked and ready for the trip."

"First the boss came out and drove away himself?" repeated the footman. "Then, just now, he called for the car to be sent around, just as though he hadn't been in it the first time? That is funny! In fact - it's impossible."

Carlisle stared at him, forehead wrinkled.

"For the last hour," said the footman, "Mr. Besson has been in his rooms. I overheard him dictating a few letters to his private secretary, and I helped his man pack his bag. So he couldn't have driven out of the garage and then back again!"

The chauffeur bit his lip. He was silent for a long time as the meaning of the statement came home to him.

"He didn't drive out of the garage an hour ago and come back again twenty-five minutes later? Then who did? And why?"

The footman shook his head.

"Did you see the boss's face?"

"No," admitted the chauffeur. "As I said, I was washing down the town car. I heard his voice, and saw his body as he climbed in behind the wheel. But it was his voice! I'll swear to that."

"Well," said the footman slowly, "somebody besides Besson took that car out of the garage for half an hour. I wonder - if they did something to it?"

The chauffeur wiped sweat from his forehead. "It - it felt all right as I drove it out of the garage. But if a steering-rod was sawed half in two or something ...."

He stopped. Besson was a notoriously fast driver. He burned the roads at ninety miles an hour in his frequent trips to cities near Detroit.

"Maybe nothing was done to the car." said the footman through lips inclined to be a little pale. "Better not say anything, anyhow, about this. It might get you into trouble."

Carlisle nodded. He went back to the garage. But on his face a look of foreboding grew.

With all his heart he hoped the sedan hadn't been tampered with. But common sense told him it must have been. A man wouldn't take risk and trouble to get it off the Besson property for half an hour without some reason behind the act.

"Who took that car out?" he whispered to himself as he went up to his quarters again. "And what did they do to it?"

Out along the road to Cleveland, Besson sent the great sedan leaping like a live thing, unaware of the short trip it had made before he stepped into it. It was only eight in the evening. The road was fairly crowded with traffic, so Besson did not hit his highest road speed. The speedometer needle quivered at seventy.

Besson frowned a little in a puzzled way. And he was puzzled. He squirmed uneasily behind the wheel of the car.

His nerves felt as though each tiny end were being filed. And his hair was acting queerly. It had a tendency to rise on his scalp, p.r.i.c.kling and itching as if it had turned to fine wires.

He took his hands off the wheel for an instant to see if there were a short circuit somewhere in the ignition system that was sending a little current up the steering-column and into the wheel. His sensation was vaguely of the kind induced by a slight electric shock. But lifting his hands from the wheel did not lessen the sensation. And glancing down at the seat beside him he saw that a bit of paper torn from a cigarette package clung to the velous as tissue paper clings to a comb that has just been drawn through hair.

Traffic cleared. Frowning, Besson pressed harder on the accelerator. The car leaped up to ninety-four miles an hour, roaring down the road with a sonorous, low-pitched scream.

No man saw what happened after that. A dozen pairs of eyes were drawn to the spot a second later; but none observed the entire proceeding.

At one moment the special-built car was racing along the concrete. At the next, there was an enormous flare of violet-colored light - and there was no car there. Furthermore, there was no trace anywhere on the road or alongside the road that such a car had existed.

Besson, the sedan, and everything else, had utterly disappeared.

A woman behind the counter of a roadside stand was the first of the dozen witnesses to break the awful silence following the blinding violet flare which a man and a car had vanished in, utterly from the earth.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" he screamed.

It snapped the spell. Truck drivers, pleasure car owners, proprietors and patrons of the roadside stands near by, raced to the spot.

"My G.o.d!" the woman screamed again, shrill and high.

The men did not cry out, nor did they say anything. They simply looked at each other and then at the road.

A long black streak of charred concrete was all the evidence left of the speeding sedan.

2. THE DEATH ENGINE.

In the experimental room of the Dryer Automobile Corporation, three men stood looking at a roadster.

Outside, in the great shop, all was thunder and clangor. The big machines that turned out the production stream of Detroit's third largest motor factory were so expensive that they had to be run day and night so that now, at ten in the evening, the uproar was as great as at ten in the morning.

But here in the corner laboratory the roar penetrated only as a murmur, and in critical silence the three men examined the roadster.

It was a tremendous thing. The wheelbase was nearly a hundred and sixty inches. The hood sloped off and away from the windshield as if the power of a locomotive were under it - which was almost the truth. It gleamed with the finest and latest of enamels; a toy to delight the heart of a rajah.

"Everything is all right?" said the chief engineer to a mechanic in dungarees near by.

"Listen for yourself," said the mechanic, switching to the motor. The engineer nodded. A sour look was on his face. "Twenty-eight thousand, that thing cost to build. Well, it's some car. It'll do about a hundred and forty, won't it?"

"A hundred and forty-eight," said the mechanic.

The engineer grinned bleakly. "And Dryer's pampered son will use the speed, too. This is certainly a birthday present! When is it to be delivered?"

"First thing in the morning," replied the a.s.sistant. "I got orders two hours ago. I'm to drive it up in front of the Dryer house and leave it to "surprise" Tom Dryer. Though he knows all about it, of course."

The head engineer turned to the mechanic. "Stick a canvas over it." he ordered. "It would be a shame to get a scratch on papa's darling's plaything. I'll lock up."

The mechanic draped a great canvas, such as painters use, over the enormous roadster. The men went to the door of the experimental room, and stepped out into the clangor of the shop. The engineer locked it.

But behind that closed door was not emptiness.

As the lock clicked on the room and the roadster, a shadow stirred in a far corner near a work-bench. The shadow was that of a man who had been lurking in there for over an hour.

The man, a shapeless outline in the darkness, went toward the roadster. He lifted the canvas from over the hood and raised the hood catch. From his pocket, he took what appeared to be an aluminum box, a third as big as a cigarbox. He attached it to the reverse side of the dashboard.

From the box trailed four fine wires. One went to each wheel of the roadster. Then the man worked with the wheels. To each spoke was attached an almost invisible, flexible fin of colorless material. The fine trailing wires were adjusted so that the ends would almost touch the fins on the spokes as the wheels whirled.

The shadow figure fastened the hood down and replaced the canvas. It glided toward the door. Over the penetrating roar of the busy shop outside sounded a faint laugh. It was an icy, blood-chilling sound, twice repeated. Then the door opened as if it had never been locked - closed again, this time on a room containing no human thing, but in which was a roadster that was far indeed from being the same mechanism as that which had been hand-built in the shop.

It was hardly fifteen minutes later when the door was opened once more and the lights switched on.

The chief engineer and another man were in the doorway. The other man was young, barley twenty-four. He was blond, dressed in a tuxedo, with no hat on and with his hair rumpled a little. His blue eyes wore too bright, and he swayed a bit on his feet.

"I'm going to take her out, I tell you," he was insisting to the engineer. "It's my car, isn't it? Why should I wait till tomorrow?"

"Your father will be disappointed if you don't wait until tomorrow and use it then, on your birthday, for the first time," urged the engineer.

But the man, young Tom Dryer, only shrugged. "I want it tonight. And what I say goes around here. Wheel it out."

"But...."

"Wheel it out, I tell you!"

The engineer shrugged. He got into the roadster, after taking off the shrouding canvas. A side door of the laboratory opened. He drove it out and onto the cinder driveway leading from the fenced factory grounds.

"Boy, that's a job!" said Tom Dryer, his too bright eyes taking the lines in and power of the machine. He got in behind the wheel. The motor boomed.

"So long."

The young man waved his hand to the engineer, and drove off. The watchman at the yard gate barely had time to open the portals for the flying thing. Then young Dryer was out and off.

The engineer shook his head. His face was pale.

"So long," the boy had said. And it seemed to the older man that the words, and the parting wave of the hand, were prophetic. The farewell given for a long trip. A long, long one, perhaps.

"Drunk, and at the wheel of a thing that will go nearly a hundred and fifty miles an hour," the engineer whispered to himself. "I certainly hope...."

He turned back into the experimental laboratory without finishing the sentence.

An hour later, at a little after midnight, the great new roadster fled like a silent, tremendous night bird over the open highway. Swaying a little behind the wheel was young Dryer. Beside him sat a girl with unnatural-looking red hair, and predatory gray eyes set in a face as flawlessly regular - and as uninspiring-looking - as a beauty on a magazine cover.

"Seventy," said Tom Dryer. "And you don't feel it any more than if you were going twenty. Wait till we hit an open stretch! I'll show you speed, baby!"

"Let's be satisfied with seventy," urged the girl. She was a little pale under her rouge as she glanced from the speedometer to his face.

"Don't be like that," laughed the boy. "That's an old maid's speed. I want to show you what this buggy can do!"

The girl was silent for a moment. She moved restlessly in the seat. "Say," she exclaimed finally, "do you feel funny?"

"How do you mean?" said Dryer.

"Kind of itchy and nervous," said the girl.

"Nope."

"Well, I do, and my hair feels like - like it was being pulled by someone. I don't like it. And, I don't like going so fast on a road where you're apt to go round a corner and meet a car piling toward you."

"Like this?" laughed Dryer, steering around a curve on the wrong side of the road with screaming tires. "Hang on, kid! This is a straight stretch ten miles long. Bet we can make it in five minutes."

"The needle's going to eighty-five."

"Tommy," shrilled the girl. "Don't please! I - I feel...."

"Hang on!" Dryer repeated, shouting over the rush of wind. "You'll never have another ride like this!"

The needle went to a hundred.

"Tommy!" shrieked the girl. "I - oh, G.o.d...."

The night was split by a violet flare that could be seen for miles. Like concentrated lightning it burst forth, shattering the darkness along the road.