Amid sulphuric anathemas at his informant, Satan noted the report. Sailing for Europe in half an hour on a trans-Atlantic air-liner, was he? And enemy wife, all unknowing as yet, was blimping it along? In the old nick of time, as usual, was he to wish the undevoted couple mal voyage. So the Marquis d’Elie, too, was to be on board? After all, the “Turn Turtle” must think more of the Trent girl’s battered reputation than of his own pleasure.
If the big blimp was to sail in a few minutes, what was Mr. Cabot doing in the morasses of Brooklyn, only half way to the flying field? The agate-eyed personal devil was ready with explanations. The gentleman’s wife was reopening a suit for divorce on the strength of an illegitimate child whom circumstantial evidence proved to be his. The air trip was to celebrate all but the actual verdict in her favor. Cabot had started late that he might board at the last moment, thereby giving her an unhappy surprise. His car unfortunately had run into a jam around an open-air evangelist—a sensational religionist who was enthralling crowds everywhere, the Rev. Dr. Alexander Willard by name.
Scarcely could Satan restrain his risibilities. What a contretemps! Here was the deposed divine, forced to the Free Church of Outdoors by the siren Grief, with his eloquence delaying her last victim’s flight from the scandal she had brought upon him. How delightfully diabolic!
For sake of his own recent experiment at popularizing the once tedious sermon, His Augustness had Okeh short-mouth for him certain of “Nimrod’s” shots.
“I used to hunt birds and beasts. Now I hunt the hearts of men. God is my guide, Hallelujah! So what care I that I am shut out from the temples of those who call themselves the righteous? The world is too small a church for me. Through the tall timbers of humanity I hunt immortal souls. Look out for me, you quaking quail of a woman! Look out for me, you running rabbit of a man! You can’t escape me through the underbrush of your hypocrisy. I don’t miss, once I take aim. Hallelujah, I am gunning for you!”
Lest the imp mistake his dishonest amusement, Satan cut off the report. “Enough of that irreverent stuff. Listen carefully now to instructions from the First and Last. That liner likely will wait for a man of Cabot’s importance. See that you get aboard with him. You’re to closer-than-a-brother him through an opportunity for inciting cowardice which will present itself. While he sleeps insinuate into his mind a terror of death by falling and by drowning. Strengthen his primal appetence of self-protection. This is the last chance you get with me. If you fail to make an arrant coward of this man you’ll find yourself out of a deviling job for death. I am busy now, as you’d better be. A bad afternoon to you!”
The Regent of Reversals was “on terms” with the elements, as with all forces for evil through good. On hearing that calm had been planned for the high-seas, he discarded the idea of a marine storm.
Always had his worst results been obtained through natural causes. Indeed, he had come to pride himself that no cause was too natural for him. Particularly did he dislike, for reasons of his own, to interfere with a rainbow, it being a symbol to him that the Earth would not be destroyed by water. Since he had only fire as a weapon he would be in a bad fix if the coup ultimate should be sprung upon him with water power. Of course, the coup wasn’t to be sprung, not if he could forestall it, but even yet he was wracked by unrighteous rage every time he recalled Noah’s Flood. That time, he had been about as powerful as a case of dynamite—soaked. One decent thing about the Great-I-Am was that He never forgot a promise. One could count upon a rainbow, once one saw it. And Satan was “counting.”
Upon the single great indestructible under his control he must depend to vary the monotony of a placid sea. Never had the three single-eyed Cyclopeans of mythology failed to serve his purposes. Lightning Flash, Thunderbolt and Rolling Thunder would advance his scheme.
Motivation and “natural causes” arranged, he sent a peremptory summons for the Prime Minister and to him detailed instructions in the duties of a proxy escort. An hour before dawn Sin was to awaken the Royal Entertainer and conduct her straightway to the stadium of the Ball of Life. That “best bubble” of infernal invention was to entertain her by picturing some interesting Earth events as they occurred.