The surface indications were of course of the very slightest. So far they consisted merely of the photograph in the Roundabout, my speculations whether Hodgson had anything up his sleeve, and similar trifles. But others were pending. The danger of the coroner's inquest might be safely past, but at least half a dozen other rocks loomed immediately ahead. The Aiglon Company, for example, would want to know what had gone wrong with their machine, and the manufacturers would be even more interested. The same with the parachute people. The Aero Club and the Royal Aeronautical Society both have their Accidents Investigation Committees, and it was quite likely that claims against various Insurance Offices had already been lodged. You cannot thrust a finger into the close web of modern life without stirring up all manner of complexities. I suppose it was these that I had already begun to fear.

Perhaps most immediate of all was the question of unauthorized flying. What had that machine been doing over London at all? Military machines come and go under orders, but not commercial planes piloted by civilian aeronauts. Setting such things as Murder and Manslaughter entirely on one side, was it not probable that Smith would be called to book on this account? From our point of view it was obviously most undesirable that he should be brought into Court on any charge at all; but what if we couldn't prevent it? What if, in the inhuman collision of powerful business interests behind, the lawyers were to get to work—an Insurance Company resist a claim, say, or the Aiglon people proceed against the manufacturers on a point of warranty? You may think I was seeing lions in the path, but it is never safe to reckon on meeting nothing more formidable than a sheep. And I have nothing against lawyers as a class. I don't think Billy Mackwith would pick my pocket of a single sixpence. But I do believe they are like the road-mender with the stone. He hit it with his hammer ten times without breaking it, and was then asked whether he did not think he would have a better chance of splitting it if he turned it splitting-edge uppermost. "How do you know I want to split it?" he replied. I suspect even Billy of not wanting to split it sometimes.

"Willett!" I called as I entered my office after lunch that day. "Just get me out the latest thing about Air Navigation, will you?"

"Is the new one out yet?" Willett replied, walking to the big glass-fronted cupboard where we keep the current papers of this kind; the others are on the library shelves downstairs. "I think they were withdrawn. I seem to remember sending to the Stationery Office and being told there'd been a muddle of some sort."

"There must be something in force," I said. "I want that, whatever it is."

"Just a moment—ah, here we are!"

Willett was both right and wrong. A certain issue of Statutory Rules and Orders had as a matter of fact been withdrawn, but an amended reprint was now available. He handed the slender white booklet to me. It was dated April 30th, 1919, and had therefore been in force for some days at the time of the Lennox Street accident.

I walked to my desk and settled down to the study of it.

I don't know that I was very much the wiser for my efforts. So much seemed to be in the air in every sense of the word. The paper was not even an Act, but an Order, and it seemed to me that its phrases about "contravention of these Regulations" might in practice mean almost anything. What, for example, did "stress of weather or other unavoidable cause" mean? What would happen in case of a kind of accident expressly excluded from the Order—"within a circle of a radius of one mile from the center of a licensed aerodrome"? What about the special cases permitted "by direction of the Secretary of State on the recommendation of a Government Department"? I don't mean that the intention of it all wasn't plain enough. The drafters of the Regulations had done the best they could in a new and totally unexplored field. For all practical purposes this new science was just as old as the War, and these detailed points of law had not arisen during the War. But they were coming up now, a whole body of practice still to make, and any youngster who chose could loop the loop and what little proved Law there was at one and the same time.

In fact, the only quite unmistakable paragraph I found was the one that promised proper castigation "to any person obstructing or impeding the authorities" and so forth—that is to say, Hubbard, Esdaile, myself and the rest of our little gang of law-breakers.

And, before I pass on, bear with me for one moment while I ask you to observe how all History began to loom behind our Case, ready at any moment to drive it irresistibly forward. For that four-centuries-old Upspringing of daring and glory and adventure that we call the Renaissance is come suddenly and magically into our midst again to-day. There are now to seek and to chart and to possess Indies and Orients, not of the unembraced and bridal waters, but of the already defeated and subject Air. Our age hears the old imperious call, and across four hundred years of time the hands of a George receive Romance from those of an Elizabeth. It may seem a far cry from this to the Man in the Public-house, but it crept and lapped about our Case like a slowly-mounting flood. Idle rumors brought with the milk to Chelsea doorsteps; a Press eager to take its lead from any momentary whiff that ruffles the popular mind; a Government that without that Press could not govern for a week; and the radiance of this new sunburst over all—this is the apparatus of our Drakes and Burleighs of to-day. And, so long as the mighty thing went forward unimpeded, what did any individual matter?