“Have you a bit of a flag, now, Mr. Waite?” asked Mort. “Seems like we ought to have one showin’.”
“There’s one in the locker, Mort. Run it up.”
Wisdom would have asked the police for protection. It is not strange that Potter and his men never thought of that. It was they who were being attacked, and they felt themselves well able to manage the defense—that and a little more. It was a thing characteristic not only of them as individuals, but of their Americanism.
“Lights out, except the lamp Angus keeps burning—and keep quiet. I’ll stay here with Angus. The five of you scatter around the place; keep hidden and—”
“Give ’ell to anythink that comes h’along,” said Cockney Tom.
“Exactly,” Potter agreed.
They armed themselves with implements of peace, with huge wrenches, machinists’ hammers, bars, and went out quietly. Presently old Angus, the watchman, arrived. Potter would have sent him home, but the old man felt himself one of them and entitled to his share in the matter. He remained.
Because of the isolated position of the hangar, down on the shore of the lake, it was possible the plotters might make their attempt at any time after the normal hour for the activities of the place to cease had arrived. Hildegarde had not told Potter the hour she had heard named, so there could be no moment during which vigilance could be relaxed. Potter walked softly from window to window, watching, listening. Resolutely he shouldered Hildegarde out of his thoughts; the suspense, the impending danger, made it possible partially to do so. But not wholly. One might say that she stood upon the threshold alertly waiting the slightest relaxation of vigilance to slip in. And slip in she did more than once—to be ejected after a sordid mental scuffle.
Potter’s curious mental state persisted—that white light of clarity which embraced everything. He did not seem to have to reason to reach conclusions; if one could conceive of flames whose temperature was not heat, but frightful cold; if one could conceive of those flames casting their vivid, super-brilliant light so that it froze to ice crystal everything upon which it fell, one might understand his sensations. That and a silence as if the world had been dead a million years—a sense of the dead silence of things in which the dropping of a pin would have wrenched and reverberated around the globe! It had a nightmare quality which lacked only a horrid terror to make it cross the hair-line between reason and unreason....
Old Angus pottered about, a huge Stilson wrench clutched in his hand. The others were invisible. Potter looked at his watch; it was ten minutes past eleven. In a vague way he wondered if it were ten minutes past eleven on that same night or if years had intervened.