Von Herrnung returned:
"I am hellishly interested in your invention. It now occurs to me that as you happen to know my flying record"—he shrugged his great shoulders and smoothed his tight red roll of moustache with a well-manicured finger-tip—"that it is possible you would have sufficient confidence to allow me to test your gyroscopic hoverer myself?" He laughed again pleasantly as he finished: "Whatever else I may do, I give you my word of honour I shall not pile up your machine. Will you consent? It may lead—supposing you do not close with the French offer—to big business—done with my friends!"
Sherbrand had looked doubtful, only for an instant. Before the twelve-year-old eavesdropper had recovered from the shock that had set his brain spinning and his heart thumping, the situation had been accepted by the owner of the Bird of War. He held out his left hand, and von Herrnung gripped and wrenched it, noting with inward amusement that his grip had brought fresh lines of blood creeping about the edges of Sherbrand's finger-nails.
"You shake hands with the left," he commented, smiling. "Not for the first time have I noticed the peculiarity in Englishmen of the younger breed."
"It is a custom," Sherbrand answered, "with—members of an organisation to which I had, and still have, the honour to belong."
His eyes, in speaking, went to the bright-haired boy in Scout's uniform standing near them, but von Herrnung's glance had not followed his. The boy was staring wistfully at the round-faced clock on the front gable of the café restaurant—ten minutes to the half-hour and no sign of the Chief's returning. Bawne's courage began to ooze away at the ends of his fingers and toes.
"Then," von Herrnung was beginning impatiently, when a sallow, undersized young man, whose hollow chest and inky paper cuffs advertised his clerical employment, came up, touched a pen sticking out from behind his ear, and said as Sherbrand turned to him:
"Beg pardon, sir, but the telegraph-cabin is locked up proper, and Mr. Macrombie 'as carried orf the key."
"Out of sorts to-day, is he?" Sherbrand asked meaningly, and the telegraph-clerk answered:
"I've never seen 'im so bad before—in the middle of the month!"