"One moment! Send Leclair back to me. Inform Ferrara that he is to command the second gun-crew."
"Yes, sir!" And the woman was gone.
Leclair appeared, some moments later. He suspected nothing of the subterfuge whereby the Master had obtained a few minutes' conversation alone with "Captain Alden."
"You sent for me, sir?" asked the Frenchman.
"I did. I have some questions to ask you. Others can handle the guns, but you have special knowledge of great importance to me. And first, as an expert ace, what are our chances of making that shore, sir, now probably five miles off? In a crisis, I always want to ask an expert's opinion."
Leclair peered from under knit brows at the altimeter needle and the inclinometer. He leaned from the pilot-house window and looked down at the waves, now hardly a hundred feet below, their foaming hiss quite audible. From those waves, red light reflected as the sun sank, illuminated the Frenchman's lean, brown features and flung up wavering patches of illumination against the pilot-house ceiling of burnished metal, through the tilted windows that sheerly overhung the water.
"Eh bien—" murmured Leclair, noncommittally.
"Well, can we make it, sir?"
The ace inspected the vacuum-gauges, the helicopter tachometers, and shrugged his shoulders.
"'Fais tout, toi-même, et Dieu t'aidera,'" he quoted the cynical old French proverb. "If nothing gives way, there is a chance."