The air-king eyed the speaker with apparent amazement, mingled with a touch of scorn and pity, then quietly observed:--
"That is the very point, Captain. There has been far too much laxity in this respect in the past. The liberties of the small nations to make their own laws, and possess their own lands in peace, have been greatly endangered of late. It is mere brigandage for a great power to over-ride the native interests of small communities. But from to-day this brigandage must cease, at any rate over the territories where I rule."
The captain could find no reply to this sally of the desert king's, and, while a smile played about the corners of his mouth, he looked beyond this robber chief, in his gaudy trappings, to where the Scorpion lay squatting like an ugly toad upon the sands.
At length the monarch resumed his cross-examination with these words: "Come, Captain, will you pay tribute for the transit of mails across my territory, or will you not?"
"I will not!" replied the skipper.
With a flash of fire in his tones the brigand ordered: "Take the first ten sacks of mails out into the desert and burn them at once."
"It shall be done, O chief," replied Max, who immediately detailed some of the natives to carry the order into effect, when the captain, urged to it by the judge, asked:--
"What is the amount of the tribute?"
"Ten thousand pounds in English gold," came the immediate reply.
"I cannot pay it," returned the captain. "It is mere plunder," though the judge pointed out to the commander quietly that it would probably be more profitable to pay it and to get away with the mails in a damaged airship, than to leave the mails behind to be lost or destroyed in the desert.