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all the chief stockholders that an offer had been made and they could get out from under if the wreck scared them off,” Darcey said, looking harassed. “I’m willing to sell and run. Got fifty thousand in the thing. Are the answers in yet?”
    The secretary nodded. “One from Colonel Ringset, of Catawbi Iron Range, makes a majority report. I was just coming in with it. They don’t want to sell.”
    Darcey sighed.
    “I suppose they’re right in their attitude. But I wish I knew who wanted to buy. And I wish I knew what in Heaven’s name could be responsible for the disappearance of two miles—hundreds of tons—of steel railroad rails!”
    The newspapers were out by then, with stories of the fantastic theft. All had big front-page headlines. But only one said anything about the sky walker.
    A farmer had seen a man walking in the sky, taking hundred-yard strides and pushing something like a barrel ahead of him. The story was too silly for the big dailies to use. Only one, a minor tabloid, mentioned it.

CHAPTER V

Trapped!
    Even without mention of the noise in the sky, Benson would have sped to the scene of the wreck with the first tick of the news teletype flashing news to the papers—and to him. The wreck was precisely the sort of thing he was half expecting as the next break.
    But the tabloid’s account made him question the farmer first of all. The man repeated his account.
    Benson’s pale eyes had no intimation of unbelief in them. Smitty and MacMurdie were looking askance at the man, but not Benson.
    “You say the man was— walking —way up in the sky?” Benson said, paralyzed lips barely moving in his dead face.
    “Uh-huh,” said the farmer.
    “And he seemed to be pushing something ahead of him? Anyway—something was ahead of him?”
    “That’s right.” The man grew belligerent. “Say, if you think I’m nutty, too—”
    “I don’t think that,” said Benson quietly. “Now, you say he was walking very fast—taking huge strides up there.”
    “It looked like he was takin’ a hunder’ yards to a step.”
    “Mightn’t he, do you think, have been going even faster than that?”
    “Yeah, he might. But he sure wasn’t goin’ any slower.”
    They were standing near the wrecked cars. The roadbed, minus rails, was at one side of them. A few yards away, down a twenty-foot sand bluff, glittered the expanse of Lake Michigan, on the other side.
    Several hundred yards out from shore a big lake steamer trailed a plume of smoke on its way toward Chicago.
    “Can you,” said Benson, “read the name on that boat out there?”
    The farmer stared out over the water for a minute, eyes narrowing.
    “Sure!” he said. “She’s the City of Cleveland.”
    Benson nodded. The name of the boat was correct, though few eyes could have been telescopic enough to make out the letters. Benson’s pale eyes could read them quite easily at that distance. It was obvious that this farmer had a rare pair of eyes almost as good.
    And he had seen a man walking in the sky.
    Benson and Smitty and MacMurdie left him and began walking up the railless roadbed. They left the wrecked cars, being cleared away by a work train, behind them. They entered a dune section where only the sand hills, like the rolling dunes of the Sahara, surrounded them. In a short time they were as cut off from the scene of tragedy, behind, and from any trace of human habitation, as though on an actual desert.
    Benson examined the roadbed. His face, as ever, was as expressionless as a wax mask. But in his icily clear eyes was a look of surety, as if he knew in advance any story which might be told by the eerie disappearance of miles of solid steel. And in those coldly terrible eyes was death for the forces that had caused the disappearance of the rails.
    The ties were there, on the roadbed. In them were the rusted spikes which had secured the rails. The rust on the spikes was absolutely undisturbed; there was no sign that they had been sledge-hammered