He was as much bewildered at this as I had intended. "I don't understand," he said.
I replied with a passionate harangue against the wickedness of any attempt to undermine his authority, and talked until his poor half-crazed wits were in a whirl of perplexity. Then with dramatic earnestness I cried: "You have been shamefully betrayed and deceived."
"What do you mean?" he stammered.
"That," I exclaimed indignantly, pointing at the bag. "But I will see that all is made right. The bomb you have there is a sham, a fraud, a trick. The real one is in the hands of those who mean to use it when and how they please. Your counsels of humanity have been set at naught, and the lives of hundreds are in peril."
"It is impossible," he protested weakly.
"Show it to me and I will prove my words; aye, and do more than that. I will see that the real one is placed in your possession."
The look he cast at me was almost piteous in its appealing trustfulness; and after a second's pause, he unfastened the bag, and with fingers which trembled so violently that I feared he would drop it, he handed me the bomb.
That I took it with intense relief may well be imagined, and I handled it with the utmost caution and no little dread. Whether it was really the terrible engine of destruction that he believed, I did not know; but with an assumption of confidence I was very far from feeling, I pointed to some mark on it. "I knew it," I cried. "See that. The proof of the betrayal; shame! shame!" and with that I slipped it into a large inner pocket of my jacket.
"What are you going to do?" he asked as I turned to the door.
"I am on fire until this has been righted. When I return I shall have something to tell you. From this moment you, and you only, are my leader."