Inwardly raging as he was, hot, confused, unhorsed, still a strange, fingering insinuation of something agreeable had begun to waken in him. The Master, not understanding it at all, or being able to analyze sensations so foreign to all his previous thought and experience, cut the Gordian knot of puzzlement by roundly cursing himself, by Allah and the Prophet's beard, as a fool. And with a vastly disturbed mind he returned along the white, gleaming corridor—that dipped and swayed with the swift rush of Nissr—back to his own cabin.
There he found the buzzer of his little desk-telephone intermittently calling him.
"Yes, hello?" he answered, receiver at ear, as he sat down in the swivel-chair of aluminum with its hydrogen cushion.
The voice of the wireless man, Menendez, reached him. In a soft,
Spanish-accented kind of drawl, Menendez said:
"Just picked up two important radios, sir."
"Well? What are they?"
"International Air Board headquarters, in Washington, has been notified of our getaway. They have sent out calls for all air-stations in both America and Europe to put up scout-squadrons to watch for us."
"What else?"
"Two squadrons have been started westward across the Atlantic, already, to capture or destroy us."
"Indeed? Where from?" The Master spoke coldly. This information, far from seeming important to him as it had to Menendez, appeared the veriest commonplace. It was nothing but what he had expected and foreseen. He smiled grimly as he listened to the radio man's answer: