"Who's there?" he demanded.
"Telegram for Mr. Barcroft," replied a deep voice.
Had Norton paused to consider the likelihood of a telegram being delivered at a very late hour in a remote country district he might have saved himself from a great deal of personal inconvenience. But he did not.
He threw open the door. His eyes, still dazzled by the quick transition from the brilliant light within to the intense darkness without, stared vacantly into the night, while his right hand groped furtively for the expected orange coloured envelope.
As he did so a pair of powerful hands grasped his ankles. His involuntary exclamation of mingled astonishment and indignation was stifled by a thick cloth twisted over his mouth and round his head, while simultaneously his arms were pinioned to his sides.
Unable to move a limb, much less to struggle, he found himself lifted from the ground and borne away as helpless as an infant.
"Fools!" he spluttered. "Fools! You'll be sorry for this."
Whether his captors heard his muffled protests or not they paid no heed save to give the cloth that encircled his head an extra twist. The pressure upon his nose was painful. He had difficulty in breathing, so, realising that his stifled exclamations were futile, he wisely held his peace from a vocal point of view, although inwardly he was raging furiously.
He could hear the boots of his captors clattering on the cobbles until the crisp-sounding footfalls told him that the men had gained the cinder path on the east side of the house. Then, with considerable effort on the part of his bearers, he was lifted up a flight of four stone steps, beyond which, he knew, was an extensive grassfield that rose gradually for the next half mile.
Grunting and obviously short of breath the men trudged stolidly onwards for perhaps nearly two hundred yards. Once Norton thought fit to make a sudden effort and wriggle from his captors' grasp, but the attempt ended disastrously to himself. Brutally they bumped him upon the ground. The shock to the spinal system was excruciating, but it had the desired effect. The prisoner's spirit of resistance was broken; even the stern mandate, "Quiet, or you are a dead man," was unnecessary.
The scarf or cloth that enveloped his head had slipped during the struggle. He could now see. Either his kidnappers had not noticed the fact or else they regarded it as of no consequence.
He could discern the faces and upper portions of the bodies of the two men. They were tall burly fellows dressed in black oilskins. In spite of their powerful physique they were breathing stertorously; they reeked of petrol.
Another fifty yards and they came to a halt. Norton turned his head and saw what appeared at first sight to be the dark grey body of a motorcar. It was quivering under the application of some unseen influence, yet there was no purr of internal mechanism to justify the belief that it possessed self-contained machinery.
"Lash that schweinhund's ankles, Pfeil," ordered one of the fellows in German. "That is right; now do you enter first and I'll heave the English fool up so that you can get him inside."
"Now is the dangerous time," commented his companion as he scrambled through a narrow aperture.
"It is ever a dangerous time with us," rejoined the other gloomily.
"Ah, yes; but now? Supposing the wire is insufficient to take the strain?"
"It will bear thrice our total weight," replied the first speaker, "frail though it looks. No fear of that breaking. It is that highly-charged electric cable that worries me. We must have landed nearer to it than we should have done, yet it looks further away on the map."
The fellow completed his difficult task of lifting Norton into the interior of the covered-in car—the observation room of a Zeppelin floating motionless five hundred feet or so overhead.
The commander of the giant aircraft had successfully carried out a daring manoeuvre with the ultimate object of taking prisoner the man on whom his imperial master the "All-Highest" had set a price for his capture. Taking advantage of an almost imperceptible breeze and knowing his position to an almost dead certainty by means of exact cross-bearings afforded by three reservoirs, conspicuous even in the darkness, he had caused to be lowered the aluminium observation car.
In flight this contrivance is slung close under the after part of the Zeppelin, but when necessary it can be lowered by means of a fine but enormously strong flexible steel wire to a maximum distance of two thousand feet beneath the giant envelope. Thus it is possible for a Zeppelin to remain hidden in a bank of clouds and lower the observation car to within a few hundred feet of the ground. Its comparatively small size and inconspicuous colour would render it invisible even at that short distance, and give the observer an uninterrupted view of the country. By means of a telephone he could then communicate with the commander of the airship and indicate the objects singled out for attack.
On this occasion the aluminium box was lowered till it touched the ground. The two men purposely told off for the work in hand had anchored the car, thereby keeping the Zeppelin stationary also. In the event of a surprise the airship's crew would unhesitatingly sever the wire and leave the car and their two comrades to their fate.
And now most of this particular enterprise had been carried out. The supposed object of their attentions lay gagged and bound within the aluminium cage. All that remained to be done was to break out the grapnel and signal to the men in the Zeppelin to wind in the steel cable.
"All ready?" enquired Pfeil through the telephone. "Good! When I give the signal will you forge ahead to the north-east? Why? Because we are much too close to the high tension cable which Herr Leutnant knows of."
He leant through an aperture in the side of the cradle and listened intently. At the first sound of the airship's propellers he jerked a tripping-line smartly. The fluke of the grapnel folded as he did so, and the car, no longer held captive, slid jerkily over the grass.
"Up!" telephoned the German.
The next instant Norton felt himself being lifted through the air as the car ascended swiftly at a rate of five feet a second. In less than two minutes the cradle's supplementary movement ceased. It was hauled hard up against the immense bulk of the Zeppelin and secured with additional lashings.
The wind was now shrieking through the lattice work of the airship, as gathering speed she flew through the still air at a rate of nearly fifty miles an hour, or a little more than half her maximum speed.
It was cold—horribly cold. Lightly clad and coming from a warm room the prisoner felt the change acutely. He shivered in spite of his efforts to the contrary.
Gripped by the ankles he found himself being dragged like a sack of flour from the detachable car to the V-shaped gangway connecting two of the fixed gondolas. The lashings securing his lower limbs were cast off, and, thrust forward by the powerful Pfeil, he was made to walk along the narrow corridor.
"Here is the Englishman, Herr Leutnant," announced the German addressing a short, corpulent officer who stood by the bomb-dropping apparatus in the centre of the gondola.
"Good!" was the appreciative reply. Ober-leutnant Julius von Loringhoven squirmed in anticipation of winning more than a half of the promised guerdon. A share—a considerable share unfortunately—was owing to a certain individual who, acting as an agent of the German Government, had given valuable aid in snaring the proscribed Englishman. His assistance was necessary, of course, but that meant a sensible reduction of the sum of paper money with which von Loringhoven hoped to restore the fortunes of his impoverished house.
"Good!" he repeated. "Remove that covering and let me look at the pig."