“I may not answer your questions,” he replied, “but unless I am much mistaken, there will shortly arrive here one high in authority with whom you will talk. This air-ship of yours must be reported at once. It is the most momentous thing which could have happened.”
“Why so? And who is this one high in authority of whom you speak?” asked Mortimer.
Robert parried his question with the query:
“Suppose you tell me where you got your air-ship? Did you secure it from one of our camps?”
“That ruffian back there has already asked me that,” replied Mortimer, “and I told him that it wasn’t stolen, as he seemed to think, from any of your people, but was the legitimate property of His Majesty, the King.”
“Then it was sold to the royalists by some renegade of our party,” exclaimed Robert excitedly.
“Not at all,” replied Mortimer. “There you’re quite wrong.”
“Who built it, then? Have you any more such ships?” continued Robert with the same avidity.
“Steady, now!” replied Mortimer, smiling at the other’s eagerness. “You’re not particularly liberal in the matter of information and we’re not generous, either,” he added with sarcasm, “after the treatment we have experienced here.”
“For that,” replied Robert humbly, “I ask your pardon in my behalf and in behalf of many others here who will learn and not approve of what has been done. The Colonel is a hard man—a brutal man, if you will—but a highly capable one. Hence he is in command here. Blood will have to be shed so that our cause may prevail, but the great mass of us are, I may truly say, opposed to any unnecessary violence.”