The Kingdom of Slender Swords

by Hallie Erminie Rives

Tokyo was far behind now, the pale glow ahead rising and spreading. To the right he could see the clumped lights of the villages along the railroad, Kamata—Kawasaki—Tsurumi. He dropped still lower, out of the lash of the wind.

Suddenly a flying missile struck the forward plane, which resounded like a great drum. A drop of something red fell on his bare hand and a feathered body fell like a stone between his feet. A dark carpet, dotted with foam, seemed to spring up out of the gulf. Daunt threw himself at the levers and rammed them back. The Glider had almost touched the sea—for a heartbreaking instant he thought it could never rise. He heard the curl of the waves, and a cry from behind him. Then, slowly, slowly, breasting the blast, it came staggering up the hill of air to safety.

The sky was perceptibly lightening now. Daunt realized it with a tightening of all his muscles. It was the first tentative withdrawal of the forces of the dark. Should he be in time? With his free hand he loosened the coil of the grapnel. Suddenly the chances seemed all against success. A feeling of hopelessness caught him. He thought of the two men he had left behind, waiting—waiting. What message would come to them that morning?

The engine was doing its best, every fiber of tested steel and canvas ringing and throbbing. But the creeping pallor of the night grew apace. Kanagawa:—the Glider swooped above it, left it behind. The misty glow was all around now, lights pricked up through the shadow. Yokohama was under his feet, and ahead—the darker mass toward which he was hurtling—was the Bluff.

Slowly, with painful anxiety, he swung the huge float in to skirt the cliff's seaward edge. There was the naval hospital with its flag-staff. There beyond, was the familiar break in the rampart of foliage—and there, flapping in the wind, was the awning on the flat roof of the Roost. In the dawning twilight, it seemed a monstrous, leprous lichen, shuddering at the unholy thing it hid. Daunt threw out the grapnel.

He curved sharply in, aslant to the wind, flung down his prow and swooped upon it. There was a tearing, splintering complaint of canvas and bamboo; the Glider seemed to stop, to tremble, then leaped on. Turning his head, Daunt saw the awning disappear like a collapsed kite. He caught a glimpse, on the steep, ascending roadway of a handful of naked men running staggeringly, one straggler far behind. The thought flashed through his mind that these were the cadets from the Naval College. But they would be too late! The sun was coming too swiftly. The sky was a tide of amethyst—the dawn was very near! He came about in a wide loop that took him out over the bay, making the turn with the wind. For a fraction of a second he looked down—on the Squadron of battle-ships, a geometrical cluster of black blots from which straight wisps of dark smoke spun like raveled yarn into the formless obscurity. A shrill, mad laugh came from behind him.

Daunt was essaying a gigantic figure-of-light whose waist was the flat bungalow roof. It was a difficult evolution in still sunlight and over a level ground. He had now the semi-darkness, and the sucking down-drafts of the wind that made his flight, with its driving falls and recoveries, seem the careless fury of a suicide. Yet never once did his hand waver, never did that strange, tense coolness desert him.

As he swept back, like a stone in the sling of the wind, he saw the thing he had come to destroy. It had the appearance of a large camera, set on a spidery tripod near the edge of the flat roof, its lens pointing out over the anchorage. Landing was out of the question; to slacken speed meant to fall. He must strike the machine with the body of the Glider or with the grapnel. To strike the roof instead meant to be hurled headlong, mangled or dead, his errand unaccomplished, down somewhere in that medley of roofs and foliage. The chances that he could do this seemed suddenly to fade to the vanishing point. A wave of profound hopelessness chilled his heart.

With Phil's mad, derisive laughter ringing in his ears, he dropped the Glider's stem and drove it obliquely across. The grapnel bounded and clanged along the tiling, missing the tripod by three feet. On, in an upward staggering lunge, then round once more, wearing into the wind.

There was no peal of laughter now from the man clinging to the steel rib. With the clarity of the lunatic Phil saw how close the swoop had been. The scourge of the wind and the rapid flight through the rarefied air had exalted him to a cunning frenzy. He had no terror of the moment—all his fear centered in the to-morrow. To his deranged imagination the black square on the tripod represented his safety. He had forgotten why. But Bersonin had made him see it clearly. It must not be touched! Daunt was the devil—he was trying to send him to the copper-mines, to work underground, with chains on his feet, as long as he lived!