“What chord?”
“That of vengeance!”
“Vengeance?—against whom?”
“Against all those who have made themselves his enemies by discouraging him, by spurning him, expelling him, by constraining him to go a-begging from country to country with an invention of incontestable superiority! Now all notion of patriotism is extinct in his soul. He has now but one thought, one ferocious desire: to avenge himself upon those who have denied him—and even upon all mankind! Really, Mr. Hart, your governments of Europe and America committed a stupendous blunder in refusing to pay Roch the price his fulgurator is worth!”
And Engineer Serko describes enthusiastically the various advantages of the new explosive which, he says, is incontestably superior to any yet invented.
“And what a destructive effect it has,” he adds. “It is analogous to that of the Zalinski shell, but is a hundred times more powerful, and requires no machine for firing it, as it flies through the air on its own wings, so to speak.”
I listen in the hope that Engineer Serko will give away a part of the secret, but in vain. He is careful not to say more than he wants to.
“Has Thomas Roch,” I ask, “made you acquainted with the composition of his explosive?”
“Yes, Mr. Hart—if it is all the same to you—and we shall shortly have considerable quantities of it stored in a safe place.”
“But will there not be a great and ever-impending danger in accumulating large quantities of it? If an accident were to happen it would be all up with the island of——!”