But the crisp clear blue of the cold morning was wonderfully suitable to the hosts of the air and they were at work.  Along a battle front of five hundred miles in the west and of seven or eight hundred in the east messages were flashing, on wires by telephone and telegraph and then on nothing but the pulsating air.

John, who had been compelled to deal so much with these invisible agencies felt them now about him.  He had a highly sensitive mind like a photographic plate that registered everything, and when he opened the window that he might see better and admit the fresh air, he did not have to reach out for knowledge.  It came, and registered itself upon that delicate and imaginative mind.  He had thought so much and he had striven so hard to see and to divine what lay before him that he felt almost able to send messages of his own through the air, messages of hope winging their way directly to Julie.

The mind of man is a strange thing.  It may be a godlike instrument, the powers of which are yet but little known.  John did not believe in the least in anything supernatural, but he did believe in the immense and unfathomed power of the natural.  Alone, and in the early dawn with silence all about him it seemed that he heard Julie calling to him.  Her voice traveled like the wireless on the pulsating air.  She needed him and she turned to him alone for aid.  She had divined in some manner that only he could help her and he would come, no matter what the risk.  The cry was registered again and again upon his sensitive soul, and always he sent back the answer that he was coming.  His mind, like hers, had become a wireless, and both were working.

He became unconscious of time and place.  He no longer saw the blue sky, but he stretched out his arms and called: 

“I am coming!”

“Coming?  What do you mean by coming?  Who is it you’re telling?”

John came out of his dream, or the misty region between here and nowhere, and turned to Jacques, who in the process of awakening at that moment had heard his words which were spoken in French.

“I was just talking to the air,” replied John a little uncertainly.  “Fine mornings appeal to me, and I was telling this one that I’d soon come out into it”

Jacques continued to awaken.  He was a big man who worked hard and who slept heavily.  Rousing from sleep was a task accomplished by degrees and it took some time.  He had heard John with one ear and now he heard with the other.  His right eye opened slowly and then the left.  The blood became more active in his brain and in a minute or two he was awake all over.

“Telling the morning air that you’re coming out into it, eh Castel?” he said as he put one foot on the floor.  “You’re a poet, I see.  You don’t look it, but being French, as you Lorrainers are, it makes you fond of poetry.”

“I do believe you have it right, Jacques,” said John, “but if I can get my breakfast now I mean to go upon the road at once.”