In a few minutes Mrs. Pillivant entered. She was a faded, fair woman in the late thirties, wearing a cloth skirt and tartan silk low-cut blouse, and a string of pearls around a bony neck.
“So you’ve been Zepped, I hear,” she said. “No, don’t get up. Stay where you are. If you haven’t heard it already, you’ll be glad to know it came down in flames on the moor about twenty miles away, and all the brutes were burned alive.”
Baltazar set his teeth, monstrously striving to get his brain to work.
“Brutes? What brutes? What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“Why, the crew of the Zeppelin. Where it came from or what it was doing about here, we don’t know—we’ll have to wait until news comes from London. It must have been badly damaged, and lost its way in the mist. They must have got rid of their bombs before trying to land, so my husband says—but before they had time to land the Zeppelin came to grief. We heard the bombs, but thought they had dropped on the moor. We’d no idea they had got anybody.”
“Zeppelin! Zeppelin!” murmured Baltazar. “I seem to have heard the name——”
“It’s pretty familiar, I should think,” said Mrs. Pillivant. “Don’t you think the best thing to do is to let us put you to bed, until the doctor comes?”
“The doctor must go to Quong Ho, at once. He’s dying,” said Baltazar.
“Then I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Pillivant.
Baltazar closed his eyes. “I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s the knock on the head, and the long walk on an empty stomach.”