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340 l Aerial Trigonometry — Hall Reticent GLANCING across now and then at my com- panion, I noticed that he was having con- siderable difficulty in, at the same time, man- aging the kite and manipulating his transit. But as the kite continued to rise and steadied in posi- tion his task became easier, until at length he ceased to remove his eye from the telescope while holding the string with outstretched hand. "Don't lose sight of it now for an instant!" he shouted. For at least half an hour he continued to manipu- late the string, sending the kite now high towards the zenith with a sudden pull, and then letting it drift off. It seemed at last to become almost a fixed point. Very slowly the angles changed, when, sud 1 denly, there was a flash, and to my amazement I saw the paper of the kite shrivel and disappear in a momentary flame, and then the bare sticks came tumbling out of the sky. "Did you get the angles?" yelled Hall, excitedly. "Yes; the telescope is still pointed on the spot where the kite disappeared." "Read them off," he ealled, "and then get your angle with Syx works." "All right," I replied, doing as he had requested, and noticing at the same time that he was in the act of putting his watch in his pocket. "Is there anything else?" I asked. "No, that will do, thank you." Hall came running over, his face beaming, and with the air of a man who has just hooked a par- ticularly cunning old trout. "Ah !" he exclaimed, "this has been a great suc- cess ! I could almost dispense with the calculation, but it is best to be sure." "What are you about, anyhow?" I asked, "and what was it that happened to the kite?" "Don't interrupt me just now, please," was the only reply I received. Mr. Hall Decides to Try Alchemy Too THEREUPON my friend sat down on a rock, pulled out a pad of paper, npted the angles which I had read on the transit, and fell to figuring with feverish haste. In the course of his work he consulted a pocket almanac, then glanced up at the sky, muttered approvingly, and finally leaped to his feet with a half -suppressed "Hurrah!" If I had not known him so well I should have thought that he had gone daft. "Will you kindly tell me," I asked, "how you managed to set the kite afire?" Hall laughed heartily. "You thought it was a trick, did you?" said he. "Well, it was no trick, but a very beautiful demonstration. You surely haven't forgotten the scarlet tanager that gave you such a surprise the day before yesterday." "Do you mean," I exclaimed, startled at the sug- gestion, "that the fate of the bird had any connec- tion with the accident to your kite?" "Accident isn't precisely the right word," replied Hall. "The two things are as intimately related =3.3 own brothers. If you should care to hunt up the kite sticks, you would find that they, too, are now artemisium plated." "This is getting too deep for me," was all that J could say. "I am not absolutely confident that I .have touched bottom myself," said Hall, "but I'm going to make another dive, and if I don't bring up treas- ures greater than Vanderdeeken found at the bot- tom of the sea, then Dr. Syx is even a more won- derful human mystery than I have thought him to be." "What do you propose to do' next?" "To shake the dust of the Grand Teton from my shoes and go to San Francisco, where I have an extensive laboratory." "So you are going to try a little alchemy your- self, are you?" "Perhaps; who knows? At any rate, my good friend, I am forever indebted to you for your assistance, and even more for your discretion, and if I succeed you shall be the first person in the world to hear the news." CHAPTER X Better Than Alchemy I COME now to a part of my narrative which would have been deemed altogether incredible in those closing years of the nineteenth cen- tury that witnessed the first steps towards the solution of the deepest mysteries of the ether, al- though men even then held in their hands, without knowing it, powers which, after they had been mastered and before use had made them familiar, seemed no less than godlike. For six months after Hall's departure for San Francisco I heard nothing from him. Notwith- standing my intense desire to know what he was doing, I did not seek to disturb him in his retire- ment. In the meantime things ran on as usual in the world, only a ripple being caused by renewed discoveries of small nuggets of artemisium on the Tetons, a fact which recalled to my mind the re- mark of my friend when he dislodged a flake of the, metal from a crevice during our ascent of the peak. At last one day I received this telegram at my office in New York : "San Francisco, May 16, 1940. "Come at once. The mystery is solved. "(Signed) Hall." As soon as I eould pack a grip I was flying west- ward one hundred miles an hour. On reaching San Francisco, which had made enoromus strides since the opening of the twentieth century, owing to the extension of our Oriental possessions, and which already ranked with New York and Chicago among the financial capitals of the world, I hastened to Hall's laboratory. He was there expecting me, and, after a hearty greeting, during which his elation over his success was manifest, he said : "I am compelled to ask you to make a little jour- ney. I found it impossible to secure the necessary privacy here, and, before opening my experiments, I selected a site for a new laboratory in an unfre- quented spot among the mountains this side of. Lake Tahoe. You will be the first man, with the exception of my two devoted assistants, to see my apparatus, and you shall share the sensation of the critical experiment." "Then you have not yet completed your solution of the secret ?" "Yes, I have; for I am as certain of the result