For an instant, Don found it hard to go on. This child opposite him might be a Scorpion spy, even one of the cleverest, but tonight she was simply a girl in love. A very young girl, who had clearly laid her heart at the feet of her hero, Count André Borg. And Don, the pseudo André, was going to hurt her feelings cruelly.
It was a tough job, the young commander told himself, but it had to be done. In the United States Navy’s war against the warmakers, sometimes the innocent had to suffer.
Bending forward, Don pushed away the sleek, dark hair just above his temple, to show the neatly taped head wound.
“That happened during the attack on the Navy gunboat, five days ago,” he said grimly. “A machine gun bullet ripped through my seaplane and grooved my skull. It was Don Winslow himself who pulled me out of the water, after the plane cracked up—or so they tell me. I woke up in the brig some hours later, too dazed to know if I was afloat or ashore. Gradually my mind cleared. But my memory has been skipping cogs ever since!”
Slowly the look of fright left Lotus’ face. Two large tears trickled down each side of her pretty nose, but her lips smiled tenderly.
“My poor André!” she cried, softly. “It must make you feel queer—as if you were someone else—to have your memory 'skip cogs’! But that is certain to cure itself! After all your brain is not like the gears of a car that have to be thrown away when they are broken. You remember me! Very soon you will recall everything. In the meantime, let Lotus be your memory, dear André!”
As Don Winslow gazed into her eager, pleading little face, he felt like kicking himself. Only the fact that duty came before sentiment kept him from blurting out the whole true story, then and there.
“Very well, child!” he said, glancing down at his newly manicured fingernails. “I certainly hope you are right about my mind clearing up in time; but right now I am finding this loss of memory pretty awkward. For instance, who is that large, Oriental person coming toward us? He looks as if he knew me, all right, but I can’t name him, for the life of me!”
“Cho-San!” came Lotus’ gasp. “Why, André! You don’t even remember ... my guardian? The greatest power in all Scorpia, next to the master? Oh, this is terrible! You must pretend to remember Cho-San, whatever else you’ve forgotten, André!”