“So equal that all this war-scare is piffle. But I rather like to see you English get up in the air occasionally. It will do you good. You’ve an idea because you walloped Napoleon that you’re the same race you were then, and you are not. The English-speaking races, as the first soldiers, have ceased to be.”
“Well, I be dem!” gasped the colonel.
“It’s the truth. Take the American: he thinks there is nothing in the world but money. Take the Britisher: to him caste is everything. Take the money out of one man’s mind and the importance of being well-born out of the other....” He turned from the window and smiled at the artist and the empurpling Anglo-Indian.
“Abbott,” growled the soldier, “that man will some day drive me amuck. What do you think? One night, on a tiger hunt, he got me into an argument like this. A brute of a beast jumped into the middle of it. Courtlandt shot him on the second bound, and turned to me with—‘Well, as I was saying!’ I don’t know to this day whether it was nerve or what you Americans call gall.”
“Divided by two,” grinned Abbott.
“Ha, I see; half nerve and half gall. I’ll remember that. But we were talking of airships.”
“I was,” retorted Courtlandt. “You were the man who started the powwow.” He looked down into the street with sudden interest. “Who is that?”
The colonel and Abbott hurried across the room.
“What did I say, Abbott? I told you I saw him. He’s crazy; fact. Thinks he can travel around incognito when there isn’t a magazine on earth that hasn’t printed his picture.”
“Well, why shouldn’t he travel around if he wants to?” asked Courtlandt coolly.