THE ENMESHING OF THE MASTER
She fell silent, biting her full lip. Something in her eyes shamed the man. Not for all his inflexible sternness could he feel that he had come out a winner in this, their first encounter. A woman—one of the despised, ignored creatures—had deceived him. She had disobeyed his orders. She had flatly thrown down the gage of battle to him, that she would never leave Nissr alive. And last, she had forced him into planning to disseminate falsehoods among his crew—falsehoods the secret of which only she shared with him.
Unwilling as this man was to have anything in common with her, he had been obliged to have something in common—to have much. Something existed; a bond, even if an unpleasant one, had already stretched itself between these two—the first secret this man ever had shared with any woman.
"Captain Alden" smiled a little. The honors of war, so far, lay all in her camp.
The Master, feeling this to the inner marrows, humiliated, shaken, yet through it all not quite able to suppress a kind of grudging and unwilling tribute of admiration, sought to conceal his perturbation with a stern command:
"Now, madam, I will call my orderly and have you escorted to a stateroom; have you provided with everything needful for your injury. I trust it is not causing you any severe pain?"
"Pray don't waste any time or thought on any injury of mine, sir!" the woman returned.
"Very well, madam! Resume your disguise!"
She tried to sweep up her magnificent hair and secure it upon her head. But with only one hand available this proved impossible. They both saw there was no way for her to put on the toupee again.
She smiled oddly, with a half-whimsical, wholly feminine bit of malice. Her eyes seemed dancing.
"I'm afraid I can't obey you, sir," she proffered. "You can see for yourself, it can't be done."
A dull, angry flush crept over the Master's rather pale face, and lost itself in the roots of his thick, black hair. Perfectly well he saw that he was being cornered in an untenable position of half-command, half-intimacy. Without apparently exercising any wiles, this woman was none the less involving him in bonds like those the Lilliputians threw round sleeping Gulliver.
Anger welled up in his proud heart that anyone—much less a woman—should thus lower his dignity. But still his manhood dictated courtesy. He came a few steps nearer, and said:
"I must admit this seems rather an embarrassing situation. Frankly, it does not tend to ameliorate the relation between us. You have placed yourself—and me—in a peculiarly compromising position. I must try to meet it.
"Obviously you cannot expect one so unskilled as I, in things feminine, to help you in the capacity of lady's maid Therefore only one thing remains to do. Instead of calling my orderly, and having him show you your stateroom, I must in some way arrange to get you there, myself."
"That's kind of you, I'm sure," she answered, half in mockery, half in gratitude.
"There I will supply you with medical supplies. In some manner or other you can manage to do up your hair and resume your disguise. You will remain in your stateroom—under arrest—until such time as you are cast loose, tomorrow, in your plane."
"Tomorrow?"
"I should say, sometime before night of the day that has already begun. Food and drink will be brought you, of course."
"That's very good of you, sir." Her smile tantalized. The curt laconicism of her manner, in the masculine role, had changed to the softer ways of womankind. Despite himself, the Master was constrained to admire her ability as an actress.
"Of course you realize," she continued, "that to cast me loose in a plane, with only one serviceable arm, will be equivalent to committing cold-blooded murder."
"A mere detail!"
"A mere detail—to murder a woman?"
"Pardon me, you misunderstand. I mean, the manner in which you are to leave Nissr matters little, so long as you leave. I will see that you are safely landed—that no harm arrives to you.
"But you—shall not remain with us. Now, kindly stay here. Lock the cabin door after I have gone, and admit no one until I return. I will signal you with two triple knocks, thus."
He illustrated the knocks, on the table, and, unlocking the door, left the cabin in a black humor. The sound of the woman locking the door after him, the knowledge that he had been obliged to make up a little code for readmission, angered him as he rarely had been angered.
Self-protection, however, demanded these subterfuges. To let the secret escape, and to be obliged to admit having been deceived by a woman, would fatally lower his prestige with the Legionaries. How could he, if known to be the dupe of a woman, command those hard, bold men?
Humiliated, yet in his heart thankful that no one had yet penetrated the secret—as Dr. Lombardo easily might have done, had he laid forcible hands on "Captain Alden"—the Master set about the necessary task of himself preparing a stateroom and providing the requisite medical supplies.
Lombardo asked no questions. His eyes, however, had grown quizzical. No one else seemed to notice what the Master was about. Each was busy in his own place, at his own task.
Twenty minutes had passed before all was ready and the Master could return to his cabin. He rapped as agreed, and was admitted, feeling his cheeks burn at even the analogy between this clandestine entrance and some vulgar liaison—a thing he scrupulously had avoided all his life.
"Come!" he directed. She followed him. Silently he ushered her into her appointed place. No one had seen them. He followed her into the little stateroom, closed the door, folded his arms and confronted her with a grim face.
"Before leaving you, madam," said he, "I wish to repeat that only your sex has saved you from summary execution. You are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, in the code of this expedition—guilty of falsehood and deception that might have introduced fatal complications into my most carefully evolved plan.
"Nevertheless, my code as an officer prohibits any punishment other than this merely nominal arrest. I must offer you temporary hospitality. Moreover, if you need any assistance in dressing your wound, I will give it. Common humanity demands that."
"I don't need anything, thank you," she answered. "I don't ask for anything, but to stay with the Legion."
"That's a point I must positively decline to argue, madam," he informed her, shaking his head. "And, since there is nothing more to say, I wish you a very good night!"
Bowing, he left the stateroom. He heard the door-catch snap. Somehow, in some way as yet inexplicable to him, that sound caused him another discomfort. For the first time in his life he had been having private conversation with a woman—conversation that might almost have been construed as intimate, since it had held secrets. For the first time he had felt himself outwitted by a woman, beaten, made mock of. Now he was being shut away from her.
Inwardly raging as he was, hot, confused, unhorsed, still a strange, fingering insinuation of something agreeable had begun to waken in him. The Master, not understanding it at all, or being able to analyze sensations so foreign to all his previous thought and experience, cut the Gordian knot of puzzlement by roundly cursing himself, by Allah and the Prophet's beard, as a fool. And with a vastly disturbed mind he returned along the white, gleaming corridor—that dipped and swayed with the swift rush of Nissr—back to his own cabin.
There he found the buzzer of his little desk-telephone intermittently calling him.
"Yes, hello?" he answered, receiver at ear, as he sat down in the swivel-chair of aluminum with its hydrogen cushion.
The voice of the wireless man, Menendez, reached him. In a soft,
Spanish-accented kind of drawl, Menendez said:
"Just picked up two important radios, sir."
"Well? What are they?"
"International Air Board headquarters, in Washington, has been notified of our getaway. They have sent out calls for all air-stations in both America and Europe to put up scout-squadrons to watch for us."
"What else?"
"Two squadrons have been started westward across the Atlantic, already, to capture or destroy us."
"Indeed? Where from?" The Master spoke coldly. This information, far from seeming important to him as it had to Menendez, appeared the veriest commonplace. It was nothing but what he had expected and foreseen. He smiled grimly as he listened to the radio man's answer:
"One squadron has started from Queenstown. The other from the
Azores—from St. Michaels."
"Anything else?"
"Well, sir, now and then I can get a few words they're sending from plane to plane—or from plane to headquarters. They mean business. It's capture or kill. They're rating us as pirates."
"Very well. Anything really important?"
"Nothing else, sir."
"Keep me informed, if any real news comes in. But don't disturb me with trifles!"
The Master hung up the receiver, sat back in his chair and stretched his long, powerful legs under the desk. He set both elbows on the arms of the chair, joined his finger-tips and sank his lips upon them.
"I'd better be rigging that vibratory apparatus before long," he reflected. "But still, there's no immediate hurry. Time enough for all that. Lots of time."
His thoughts wandered from Nissr and the great adventure, from the coming attackers, from the vibratory apparatus, yes from the goal of all this undertaking itself, back to "Captain Alden." The who and why, the whence and whither of this strange woman urgently intruded on his mind; nor by any effort of the will could he exclude these thoughts.
For a long time, while Nissr roared away eastward, ever eastward into the night, he sat there, sunk in a profound revery.
"A woman," he whispered, finally, the words lingering on his lips. "A woman, eh? Strange—very strange!"
Resolutely he forced himself to consider the plans he had laid out; his success thus far; the means he meant to take with the attacking squadrons; the consummation of his whole campaign so vast, so overpowering in its scope.
But through it all, persisted other thoughts. And these, he found, he could not put away.
The buzzer of the desk-telephone again recalled him to himself.
"Hello, hello?"
"I have to report that a third squadron has been ordered into the air, from Monrovia," announced Menendez.
"Very well! Anything else?"
"No, sir."
The Master hung up the receiver, arose, and seemed to shake himself from the kind of torpor into which his thoughts of the woman had plunged him.
"Enough of this nonsense!" growled he. "There's work to be done—work!"
With fresh energy he flung himself into the task of planning how to meet and to repel the three air-fleets now already on the westward wing to capture or annihilate the Flying Legion.