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[Illustration: A HAIL OF SLUGS BOMBARDED THE VAST-SPREAD WINGS AND
FUSELAGE OF NISSR.]

THE FLYING LEGION

BY GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND

Published July, 1920

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I A Spirit Caged.

II "To Paradise—or Hell!"

III The Gathering of the Legionaries.

IV The Masked Recruit.

V In the Night.

VI The Silent Attack.

VII The Nest of the Great Bird.

VIII The Eagle of the Sky.

IX Eastward Ho.

X "I Am the Master's!"

XI Captain Alden Stands Revealed.

XII The Woman of Adventure.

XIII The Enmeshing of the Master.

XIV Storm Birds.

XV The Battle of Vibrations.

XVI Leclair, Ace of France.

XVII Miracles, Scourge of Flame.

XVIII "Captain Alden" Makes Good.

XIX Hostile Coasts.

XX The Waiting Menace.

XXI Shipwreck and War.

XXII Beleaguered.

XXIII A Mission of Dread.

XXIV Angels of Death.

XXV The Great Pearl Star.

XXVI The Sand-Devils.

XXVII Toil and Pursuit.

XXVIII Onward Toward the Forbidden City.

XXIX "Labbayk!"

XXX Over Mecca.

XXXI East Against West.

XXXII The Battle of the Haram.

XXXIII The Ordeal of Rrisa.

XXXIV The Inner Secret of Islam.

XXXV Into the Valley of Mystery.

XXXVI Journey's End.

XXXVII The Greeting of Warriors.

XXXVIII Bara Miyan, High Priest.

XXXIX On, to the Golden City!

XL Into the Treasure Citadel.

XLI The Master's Price.

XLII "Sons of the Prophet, Slay!"

XLIII War in the Depths.

XLIV Into the Jewel-Crypt.

XLV The Jewel Hoard.

XLVI Bohannan Becomes a Millionaire.

XLVII A Way Out?

XLVIII The River of Night.

XLIX The Desert.

L "Where There Is None but Allah."

LI Torture.

LII "Thálassa! Thálassa!"

LIII The Greater Treasure.

The Flying Legion

CHAPTER I

A SPIRIT CAGED

The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed, in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had ordered it built from his own plans, to please a whim of his restless mind, on top of the gigantic skyscraper that formed part of his properties. Windows boldly fronted all four cardinal compass-points—huge, plate-glass windows that gave a view unequaled in its sweep and power.

The room seemed an eagle's nest perched on the summit of a man-made crag. The Arabic name that he had given it—Niss'rosh—meant just that. Singular place indeed, well-harmonized with its master.

Through the westward windows, umbers and pearls of dying day, smudged across a smoky sky, now shadowed trophy-covered walls. This light, subdued and somber though it was, slowly fading, verging toward a night of May, disclosed unusual furnishings. It showed a heavy black table of some rare Oriental wood elaborately carved and inlaid with still rarer woods; a table covered with a prayer-rug, on which lay various books on aeronautics and kindred sciences, jostling works on Eastern travel, on theosophy, mysticism, exploration.

Maps and atlases added their note of research. At one end of the table stood a bronze faun's head with open lips, with hand cupped at listening ear. Surely that head must have come from some buried art-find of the very long ago. The faint greenish patina that covered it could have been painted only by the hand of the greatest artist of them all, Time.

A book-case occupied the northern space, between the windows. It, too, was crammed with scientific reports, oddments of out-of-the-way lore, and travels. But here a profusion of war-books and official documents showed another bent of the owner's mind. Over the book-case hung two German gasmasks. They seemed, in the half-dusk, to glower down through their round, empty eyeholes like sinister devil-fish awaiting prey.

The masks were flanked by rifles, bayonets, knives, maces, all bearing scars of battle. Above them, three fragments of Prussian battle-flags formed a kind of frieze, their color softened by the fading sunset, even as the fading of the dream of imperial glory had dulled and dimmed all that for which they had stood.

The southern wall of that strange room—that quiet room to which only a far, vague murmur of the city's life whispered up, with faint blurs of steamer-whistles from the river—bore Turkish spoils of battle. Here hung more rifles, there a Kurdish yataghan with two hand-grenades from Gallipoli, and a blood-red banner with a crescent and one star worked in gold thread. Aviator's gauntlets draped the staff of the banner.

Along the eastern side of this eyrie a broad divan invited one to rest. Over it were suspended Austrian and Bulgarian captures—a lance with a blood-stiffened pennant, a cuirass, entrenching tools, a steel helmet with an eloquent bullet-hole through the crown. Some few framed portraits of noted "aces" hung here and elsewhere, with two or three photographs of battle-planes. Three of the portraits were framed in symbolic black. Part of a smashed Taube propeller hung near.

As for the western side of Niss'rosh, this space between the two broad windows that looked out over the light-spangled city, the Hudson and the Palisades, was occupied by a magnificent Mercator's Projection of the world. This projection was heavily annotated with scores of comments penciled by a firm, virile hand. Lesser spaces were occupied by maps of the campaigns in Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. One map, larger than any save the Mercator, showed the Arabian Peninsula. A bold question-mark had been impatiently flung into the great, blank stretch of the interior; a question-mark eager, impatient, challenging.

It was at this map that the master of Niss'rosh, the eagle's nest, was peering as the curtain rises on our story. He was half reclining in a big, Chinese bamboo chair, with an attitude of utter and disheartening boredom. His crossed legs were stretched out, one heel digging into the soft pile of the Tabreez rug. Muscular arms folded in an idleness that irked them with aching weariness, he sat there, brooding, motionless.

Everything about the man spelled energy at bay, forces rusting, ennui past telling. But force still dominated. Force showed in the close-cropped, black hair and the small ears set close to the head; in the corded throat and heavy jaws; in the well-muscled shoulders, sinewed hands, powerful legs. This man was forty-one years old, and looked thirty-five. Lines of chest and waist were those of the athlete. Still, suspicions of fat, of unwonted softness, had begun to invade those lines. Here was a splendid body, here was a dominating mind in process of going stale.

The face of the man was a mask of weariness of the soul, which kills so vastly more efficiently than weariness of the body. You could see that weariness in the tired frown of the black brows, the narrowing of the dark eyes, the downward tug of the lips. Wrinkles of stagnation had began to creep into forehead and cheeks—wrinkles that no amount of gymnasium, of club life, of careful shaving, of strict hygiene could banish.

Through the west windows the slowly changing hues of gray, of mulberry, and dull rose-pink blurred in the sky, cast softened lights upon those wrinkles, but could not hide them. They revealed sad emptiness of purpose. This man was tired unto death, if ever man were tired.

He yawned, sighed deeply, stretched out his hand and took up a bit of a model mechanism from the table, where it had lain with other fragments of apparatus. For a moment he peered at it; then he tossed it back again, and yawned a second time.

"Business!" he growled. "'Swapped my reputation for a song,' eh?
Where's my commission, now?"

He got up, clasped his hands behind him, and walked a few times up and down the heavy rug, his footfalls silent.

"The business could have gone on without me!" he added, bitterly.
"And, after all, what's any business, compared to life?"

He yawned again, stretched up his arms, groaned and laughed with mockery:

"A little more money, maybe, when I don't know what to do with what I've got already! A few more figures on a checkbook—and the heart dying in me!"

Then he relapsed into silence. Head down, hands thrust deep in pockets, he paced like a captured animal in bars. The bitterness of his spirit was wormwood. What meant, to him, the interests and pleasures of other men? Profit and loss, alcohol, tobacco, women—all alike bore him no message. Clubs, athletics, gambling—he grumbled something savage as his thoughts turned to such trivialities. And into his aquiline face came something the look of an eagle, trapped, there in that eagle's nest of his.

Suddenly the Master of Niss'rosh came to a decision. He returned, clapped his hands thrice, sharply, and waited. Almost at once a door opened at the southeast corner of the room—where the observatory connected with the stairway leading down to the Master's apartment on the top floor of the building—and a vague figure of a man appeared.

The light was steadily fading, so that this man could by no means be clearly distinguished. But one could see that he wore clothing quite as conventional as his master's. Still, no more than the Master did he appear one of life's commonplaces. Lean, brown, dry, with a hawk-nose and glinting eyes, surely he had come from far, strange places.

"Rrisa!" the Master spoke sharply, flinging the man's name at him with the exasperation of overtensed nerves.

"M'almé?" (Master?) replied the other.

"Bring the evening food and drink," commanded the Master, in excellent
Arabic, guttural and elusive with strange hiatuses of breath.

Rrisa withdrew, salaaming. His master turned toward the western windows. There the white blankness of the map of Arabia seemed mocking him. The Master's eyes grew hard; he raised his fist against the map, and smote it hard. Then once more he fell to pacing; and as he walked that weary space, up and down, he muttered to himself with words we cannot understand.

After a certain time, Rrisa came silently back, sliding into the soft dusk of that room almost like a wraith. He bore a silver tray with a hook-nosed coffee-pot of chased metal. The cover of this coffee-pot rose into a tall, minaret-like spike. On the tray stood also a small cup having no handle; a dish of dates; a few wafers made of the Arabian cereal called temmin; and a little bowl of khat leaves.

"M'almé, al khat aja" (the khat has come), said Rrisa.

He placed the tray on the table at his master's side, and was about to withdraw when the other stayed him with raised hand.

"Tell me, Rrisa," he commanded, still speaking in Arabic, "where wert thou born? Show thou me, on that map."

The Arab hesitated a moment, squinting by the dim light that now had faded to purple dusk. Then he advanced a thin forefinger, and laid it on a spot that might have indicated perhaps three hundred miles southeast of Mecca. No name was written on the map, there.

"How dost thou name that place, Rrisa?" demanded the Master.

"I cannot say, Master," answered the Arab, very gravely. As he stood there facing the western afterglow, the profound impassivity of his expression—a look that seemed to scorn all this infidel civilization of an upstart race—grew deeper.

To nothing of it all did he owe allegiance, save to the Master himself—the Master who had saved him in the thick of the Gallipoli inferno. Captured by the Turks there, certain death had awaited him and shameful death, as a rebel against the Sublime Porte. The Master had rescued him, and taken thereby a scar that would go with him to the grave; but that, now, does not concern our tale. Only we say again that Rrisa's life lay always in the hands of this man, to do with as he would.

None the less, Rrisa answered the question with a mere:

"Master, I cannot say."

"Thou knowest the name of the place where thou wast born?" demanded the Master, calmly, from where he sat by the table.

"A (yes), M'almé, by the beard of M'hámed, I do!"

"Well, what is it?"

Rrisa shrugged his thin shoulders.

"A tent, a hut? A village, a town, a city?"

"A city, Master. A great city, indeed. But its name I may not tell you."

"The map, here, shows nothing, Rrisa. And of a surety, the makers of maps do not lie," the Master commented, and turned a little to pour the thick coffee. Its perfume rose with grateful fragrance on the air.

The Master sipped the black, thick nectar, and smiled oddly. For a moment he regarded his unwilling orderly with narrowed eyes.

"Thou wilt not say they lie, son of Islam, eh?" demanded he.

"Not of choice, perhaps, M'almé," the Mussulman replied. "But if the camel hath not drunk of the waters of the oasis, how can he know that they be sweet? These Nasara (Christian) makers of maps, what can they know of my people or my land?"

"Dost thou mean to tell me no man can pass beyond the desert rim, and enter the middle parts of Arabia?"

"I said not so, Master," replied the Arab, turning and facing his master, every sense alert, on guard against any admissions that might betray the secret he, like all his people, was sworn by a Very great oath to keep.

"Not all men, true," the Master resumed. "The Turks—I know they enter, though hated. But have no other foreign men ever seen the interior?"

"A, M'almé, many—of the True Faith. Such, though they come from China, India, or the farther islands of the Indian Ocean, may enter freely."

"Of course. But I am speaking now of men of the Nasara faith. How of them? Tell me, thou!"

"You are of the Nasara, M'almé! Do not make me answer this! You, having saved my life, own that life. It is yours. Ana bermil illi bedakea! (I obey your every command!) But do not ask me this! My head is at your feet. But let us speak of other things, O Master!"

The Master kept a moment's silence. He peered contemplatively at the dark silhouette of the Arab, motionless, impassive in the dusk. Then he frowned a very little, which was as near to anger as he ever verged. Thoughtfully he ate a couple of the little temmin wafers and a few dates. Rrisa waited in silent patience.

All at once the Master spoke.

"It is my will that thou speak to me and declare this thing, Rrisa," said he, decisively. "Say, thou, hath no man of the Nasara faith ever penetrated as far as to the place of thy birth?"

"Lah (no), M'almé, never. But three did reach an oasis not far to westward of it, fifty years ago, or maybe fifty-one."

"Ah, so?" exclaimed the Master, a touch of eagerness in his grave, impassive voice. "Who were they?"

"Two of the French blood, Master, and one of the Russian."

"And what happened to them, then?"

"They—died, Master."

"Thou dost mean, thy people did slay them?"

"They died, all three," repeated Rrisa, in even tones. "The jackals devoured them and the bones remained. Those bones, I think, are still there. In our dry country—bones remain, long."

"Hm! Yea, so it is! But, tell me, thou, is it true that in thy country the folk slay all Nasara they lay hands on, by cutting with a sharp knife? Cutting the stomach, so?" He made an illustrative gesture.

"Since you do force me to speak, against my will, M'almé—you being of the Nasara blood—I will declare the truth. Yea, that is so."

"A pleasant custom, surely! And why always in the stomach? Why do they never stab or cut like other races?"

"There are no bones in the stomach, to dull the edges of the knives, M'almé."

"Quite practical, that idea!" the Master exclaimed. Then he fell silent again. He pressed his questions no further, concerning the great Central Desert of the land. To have done so, he knew, would have been entirely futile. Beyond a certain point, which he could gauge accurately, neither gold nor fire would drive Rrisa. The Arab would at any hour of night or day have laid down his life for the Master; but though it should mean death he would not break the rites of his faith, nor touch the cursed flesh of a pig, nor drink the forbidden drop of wine, nor yet betray the secret of his land.

All at once the Arab spoke, in slow, grave tones.

"Your God is not my God, Master," said he, impersonally. "No, the God of your people is not the God of mine. We have our own; and the land is ours, too. None of the Nasara may come thither, and live. Three came, that I have heard of, and—they died. I crave my Master's bidding to depart."

"Presently, yea," the Master answered. "But I have one more question for thee. If I were to take thee, and go to thy land, but were not to ask thy help there—if I were not to ask thee to guide me nor yet to betray any secret—wouldst thou play the traitor to me, and deliver me up to thy people?"

"My head is at your feet, M'almé. So long as you did not ask me to do such things as would be unlawful in the eyes of Allah and the Prophet, and seek to force me to them, this hand of mine would wither before it would be raised against the preserver of my life! I pray you, M'almé, let me go!"

"I grant it. Ru'c'h halla!" (Go now!) exclaimed the Master, with a wave of the hand. Rrisa salaamed again, and, noiseless as a wraith, departed.

CHAPTER II

"TO PARADISE—OR HELL"

For a time the Master sat in the thickening gloom, eating the dates and temmin wafers, drinking the coffee, pondering in deep silence. When the simple meal was ended, he plucked a little sprig of leaves from the khat plant in the bowl, and thrust them into his mouth.

This khat, gathered in the mountains back of Hodeida, on the Red Sea not far from Bab el Mandeb, had been preserved by a process known to only a few Coast Arabs. The plant now in the bowl was part of a shipment that had been more than three months on the way; yet still the fresh aroma of it, as the Master crushed the thick-set, dark-green leaves, scented the darkening room with perfumes of Araby.

Slowly, with the contemplative appreciation of the connoisseur, the Master absorbed the flavor and the wondrous stimulation of the "flower of paradise." The use of khat, his once-a-day joy and comfort, he had learned more than fifteen years before, on one of his exploring tours in Yemen. He could hardly remember just when and where he had first come to know the extraordinary mental and physical stimulus of this strange plant, dear to all Arabs, any more than he definitely recalled having learned the complex, poetical language of that Oriental land of mystery. Both language and the use of khat had come to him from contact with only the fringes of the country; and both had contributed to his vast, unsatisfied longing to know what lay beyond the forbidden zones that walled this land away from all the world.

Wherever he had gone, whatever perils, hardships, and adventures had been his in many years of wandering up and down the world, khat, the wondrous, had always gone with him. The fortune he had spent on keeping up the supply had many times over been repaid to him in strength and comfort.

The use of this plant, containing obscure alkaloids of the katinacetate class, constituted his only vice—if you can call a habit such as this vice, that works great well-being and that leaves no appreciable aftermaths of evil such as are produced by alcohol or drugs.

For a few minutes the Master sat quite motionless, pondering. Then suddenly he got up again, and strode to one of the westward-looking windows. The light was almost wholly gone, now. The man's figure, big-shouldered, compact, well-knit, appeared only as a dim silhouette against the faded blur in the west; a blur smoky and streaked with dull smudges as of old, dried blood.

Far below, stretching away, away, shimmered the city's million inconsequential lights. Above, stars were peeping out—were spying down at all this feverish mystery of human life. Some of the low-hung stars seemed to blend with the far lights along the Palisades. The Master's lips tightened with impatience, with longing.

"There's where it is," he muttered. "Not five miles from here! It's there, and I've got to have it. There—a thing that can't be bought! There—a thing that must be mine!"

Among the stars, cutting down diagonally from the north-west, crept a tiny, red gleam. The Master looked very grim, as his eyes followed its swift flight.

"The Chicago mail-plane, just getting in," he commented. "In half an hour, the Paris plane starts from the Cortlandt Street aero-tower. And beyond Paris lies Constantinople; and beyond that, Arabia—the East! Men are going out that way, tonight! And I—stick here like an old, done relic, cooped in Niss'rosh—imprisoned in this steel and glass cage of my own making!"

Suddenly he wheeled, flung himself into the big chair by the table and dragged the faun's head over to him. He pressed a button at the base of it, waited a moment and as the question came, "Number, please?" spoke the desired number into the cupped hand and ear of the bronze. Then, as he waited again, with the singular telephone in hand, he growled savagely:

"By Allah! This sort of thing's not going to go on any longer! Not if
I die stopping it!"

A familiar voice, issuing from the lips of the faun—a voice made natural and audible as the living human tones, by means of a delicate microphone attachment inside the bronze head—tautened his nerves.

"Hello, hello!" called he. "That you, Bohannan?"

"Yes," sounded the answer. "Of course I know who you are. There's only one voice like yours in New York. Where are you?"

"In prison."

"No! Prison? For the Lord's sake!"

"No; for conventionality's sake. Not legally, you understand. Not even an adventure as exciting as that has happened to me. But constructively in jail. De facto, as it were. It's all the same thing."

"Up there in that observatory thing of yours, are you?" asked
Bohannan.

"Yes; and I want to see you."

"When?"

"At once! As soon as you can get over here in a taxi, from that incredibly stupid club of yours. You can get to Niss'rosh even though it's after seven. Take the regular elevator to the forty-first floor, and I'll have Rrisa meet you and bring you up here in the special.

"That's a concession, isn't it? The sealed gates that no one else ever passes, at night, are opened to you. It's very important. Be here in fifteen minutes you say? First-rate! Don't fail me. Good-bye!"

He was smiling a little now as he pressed the button again and rang off. He put the faun's head back on the table, got up and stretched his vigorous arms.

"By Allah!" he exclaimed, new notes in his voice. "What if—what if it could be, after all?"

He turned to the wall, laid his hand on an ivory plate flush with the surface and pressed slightly. In silent unison, heavy gold-embroidered draperies slid across every window. As these draperies closed the apertures, light gushed from every angle and cornice. No specific source of illumination seemed visible; but the room bathed itself in soft, clear radiance with a certain restful greenish tinge, throwing no shadows, pure as the day itself.

The man pulled open a drawer in the table and silently gazed down at several little boxes within. He opened some. From one, on a bed of purple satin, the Croix de Guerre, with a palm, gleamed up at him. Another disclosed an "M.M.," a Médaille Militaire. A third showed him the "D.F.C.," or Distinguished Flying Cross. Still another contained aviator's insignia in the form of a double pair of wings. The Master smiled, and closed the boxes, then the drawer.

"After these," he mused, "dead inaction? Not for me!"

His dark eyes were shining with eagerness as he walked to a door beside that through which the Arab had entered. He swung it wide, disclosing an ample closet, likewise inundated with light. There hung a war-worn aviator's uniform of leather, gauntlets, a sheepskin jacket, a helmet, resistal goggles, a cartridge-belt still half full of ammunition, a heavy service automatic.

For a moment the man looked in at these. A great yearning came upon his face. Caressingly he touched the uniform, the helmet. He unhooked the pistol from where it hung, and carried it back to the table.

There he laid it down, and drew up his chair in front of it. For a moment, silence fell as he remained there studying the automatic—silence save for the faint, far hum of the city, the occasional melodious note of steamer-whistles on the river.

The Master's face, now that full light brought out its details, showed a white scar that led from his right ear down along jaw and throat, till the collar masked it. Gray hairs, beyond those of his age, sprinkled his temples. Strangely he smiled as he observed the nicks and deep excoriations in stock and barrel of the formidable weapon. He reached out, took up the gun once more, weighed it, got the feel of it, patted it with affection.

"We've been through some wonderful times together, old pal, you and I," said he. "We thought it was all over, didn't we, for a while? But it's not! Life's not done, yet. It's maybe just beginning! We're going out on the long trek, again!"

For a while he sat there musing. Then he summoned Rrisa again, bade him remove the tray, and gave him instructions about the guest soon to arrive. When Rrisa had withdrawn, the Master pulled over one of the huge atlases, opened it, turned to the map of Arabia, and fell into deep study.

Rrisa's tapping at the door, minutes later, roused him. At his order to advance, the door swung. The Arab ushered in a guest, then silently disappeared. Without a sound, the door closed.

The Master arose, advancing with outstretched hand.

"Bohannan! God, but I'm glad to see you!"

Their hands met and clasped. The Master led Bohannan to the table and gestured toward a chair. Bohannan threw his hat on the table with a large, sweeping gesture typical of his whole character, and sat down. And for a moment, they looked at each other in silence.

A very different type, this, from the dark, sinewed master of Niss'rosh. Bohannan was frankly red-haired, a bit stout, smiling, expansive. His blood was undoubtedly Celtic. An air of great geniality pervaded him. His hands were strong and energetic, with oddly spatulate fingers; and the manner in which his nails had been gnawed down and his mustache likewise chewed, bespoke a highly nervous temperament belied by his ruddy, almost boyish face. His age might have been thirty-five, but he looked one of those men who never fully grow up, who never can be old.

"Well, what's doing now?" demanded he, fixing blue eyes on his host. He produced a cigarette and lighted it, inhaled smoke deeply and blew a thin gray cloud toward the ceiling. "Something big, eh? by the way you routed me out of a poker-game where I was already forty-seven dollars and a half to the good. You don't usually call a fellow, that way, unless there's something in the wind!"

"There is, now."

"Big?"

"Very."

"So?" The newcomer's eyes fell on the pistol. "Yes, that looks like action, all right. Hope to heaven it is! I've been boring myself and everybody else to death, the past three months. What's up? Duel, maybe?"

"Yes. That's just it, Bohannan. A duel." And the Master fixed strange eyes on his companion. His muscular fingers fell to tapping the prayer-rug on the table, drumming out an impatient little tattoo.

"Duel? Lord's sake, man! With whom?"

"With Fate. Now, listen!" The Master's tones became more animated. A little of the inward fires had begun to burn through his self-restraint. "Listen to me, and not a word till I'm done! You're dryrotting for life, man. Dying for it, gasping for it, eating your heart out for it! So am I. So are twenty-five or thirty men we know, between us, in this city. That's all true, eh?"

"Some!"

"Yes! We wouldn't have to go outside New York to find at least twenty-five or thirty in the same box we're in. All men who've been through trench work, air work, life-and-death work on various fronts. Men of independent means. Men to whom office work and club life and all this petty stuff, here, is like dish-water after champagne! Dare-devils, all of them, that wouldn't stop at the gates of Hell!"

"The gates of Hell?" demanded Bohannan, his brow wrinkling with glad astonishment. "What d'you mean by that, now?"

"Just what I say! It's possible to gather together a kind of unofficial, sub rosa, private little Foreign Legion of our own, Bohannan—all battle-scarred men, all men with at least one decoration and some with half a dozen. With that Legion, nothing would be impossible!"

He warmed to his subject, leaned forward, fixed eager eyes on his friend, laid a hand on Bohannan's knee. "We've all done the conventional thing, long enough. Now we're going to do the unconventional thing. We've been all through the known. Now we're going after the unknown. And Hell is liable to be no name for it, I tell you that!"

The Celt's eyes were alight with swift, eager enthusiasm. He laid his hand on the other's, and gripped it hard in hot anticipation.

"Tell me more!" he commanded. "What are we going to do?"

"Going to see the stuff that's in us, and in twenty-five or thirty more of our kind. The stuff, the backbone, the heart that's in you, Bohannan! That's in me! In all of us!"

"Great, great! That's me!" Bohannan's cigarette smoldered, unheeded, in his fingers. The soul of him was thrilling with great visions. "I'm with you! Whither bound?"

The Master smiled oddly, as he answered in a low, even tone:

"To Paradise—or Hell!"

CHAPTER III

THE GATHERING OF THE LEGIONARIES

One week from that night, twenty-seven other men assembled in the strange eyrie of Niss'rosh, nearly a thousand feet above the city's turmoil. They came singly or in pairs, their arrival spaced in such a manner as not to make the gathering obvious to anyone in the building below.

Rrisa, the silent and discreet, brought them up in the private elevator from the forty-first floor to the Master's apartment on the top story of the building, then up the stairway to the observatory, and thus ushered them into the presence of the Master and Bohannan. Each man was personally known to one or the other, who vouched absolutely for his secrecy, valor, and good faith.

This story would resolve itself into a catalogue were each man to be named, with his title, his war-exploits, his decorations. We shall have to touch but lightly on this matter of personnel. Six of the men were Americans—eight, including the Master and Bohannan; four English; five French; two Serbian; three Italian; and the others represented New Zealand, Canada, Russia, Cuba, Poland, Montenegro, and Japan.

Not one of these men but bore a wound or more, from the Great Conflict. This matter of having a scar had been made one prime requisite for admission to the Legion. Each had anywhere from one to half a dozen decorations, whether the Congressional Medal, the V.C., the Croix de Guerre, the Order of the Rising Sun, or what-not.

Not one was in uniform. That would have made their arrival far too conspicuous. Dressed as they were, in mufti, even had anyone noted their coming, it could not have been interpreted as anything but an ordinary social affair.

Twenty-nine men, all told, gathered in the observatory, clearly illuminated by the hidden lights. All were true blue, all loyal to the core, all rusting with ennui, all drawn thither by the lure of the word that had been passed them in club and office, on the golf links, in the street. All had been pledged, whether they went further or not, to keep this matter secret as the grave.

Some were already known to each other. Some needed introduction. Such introduction consumed a few minutes, even after the last had come and been checked off on the Master's list, in cipher code. The brightly lighted room, behind its impenetrable curtains, blued with tobacco-smoke; but no drop of wine or spirits was visible.

The Master, at the head of the table, sat with his list and took account of the gathering. Each man, as his name was called, gave that name in full, briefly stated his service and mentioned his wound.

All spoke English, though some rather mangled it. At any rate, this was to be the official language of the expedition, and no other was to be allowed. The ability to understand and obey orders given in English had, of course, to be one essential requisite for this adventurous band of Legionaries.

When all the credentials had been proved satisfactory, the Master rapped for order. Silence fell. The men settled down to listen, in tense expectancy. Some took chairs, others occupied the divan, still others—for whom there were no seats—stood along the walls.

Informal though the meeting still was, an air of military restraint and discipline already half possessed it. The bright air seemed to quiver with the eagerness of these fighting-men once more to thrust out into the currents of activity, to feel the tightening of authority, the lure and tang of the unknown.

Facing them from the end of the table, the Master stood and spoke to them, with Bohannan seated at his right. His face reflected quite another humor from that of the night, a week before, when first this inspiration had come upon him.

He seemed refreshed, buoyant, rejuvenated. His eyes showed fire. His brows, that had frowned, now had smoothed themselves. His lips smiled, though gravely. His color had deepened. His whole personality, that had been sad and tired, now had become inspired with a profound and soul-felt happiness.

"Gentlemen all, soldiers and good men," said he, slowly. "In a general way you know the purpose of this meeting. I am not given to oratory. I do not intend making any speech to you.

"We are all ex-fighters. Life, once filled with daring and adventure, has become stale, flat, and unprofitable. The dull routine of business and of social life is Dead Sea fruit to our lips—dust and ashes. It cannot hold or entertain us.

"By this I do not mean that war is good, or peace bad. For the vast majority of men, peace is normal and right. But there must be always a small minority that cannot tolerate ennui; that must seek risks and daring exploits; that would rather lay down their lives, today, in some man-sized exploit, than live twenty-five years longer in the dull security of a humdrum rut.

"Such men have always existed and probably always will. We are all, I believe, of that type. Therefore you will all understand me. I will understand you. And each of you will understand the rest.

"Major Bohannan and I have chosen you and have invited you here because we believe every man in this room is precisely the kind of man I have been defining. We believe you are like ourselves, dying of boredom, eager for adventure; and willing to undergo military discipline, swear secrecy, pledge honor and risk life itself, provided the adventure be daring enough, the reward promising enough. If there is anyone here present who is unwilling to subscribe to what I have said, so far, let him withdraw."

No one stirred. But a murmur arose, eager, delighted:

"Go on! Go on—tell us more!"

"Absolute obedience to me is to be the first rule," continued the Master. "The second is to be sobriety. There shall be no drinking, carousing, or gambling. This is not to be a vulgar, swashbuckling, privateering revel, but—"

A slight disturbance at the door interrupted him. He frowned, and rapped on the table, for silence. The disturbance, however, continued. Someone was trying to enter there against Rrisa's protests.

"I did not bring you up, sir," the Arab was saying, in broken English.
"You cannot come in! How did you get here?"

"I'm not in the habit of giving explanations to subordinates, or of bandying words with them," replied the man, in a clear, rather high-pitched but very determined voice. The company, gazing at him, saw a slight, well-knit figure of middle height or a little less, in aviator's togs. "I'm here to see your master, my good fellow, not you!"

The man at the head of the table raised a finger to his lips, in signal of silence from them all, and beckoned the Arab.

"Let him come in!" he ordered, in Rrisa's vernacular.

"A, M'almé" submitted the desert man, standing aside and bowing as the stranger entered. The Master added, in English:

"If he comes as a friend and helper, uninvited though he be, we welcome him. If as an enemy, traitor, or spy, we can deal justice to him in short order. Sir, advance!"

The stranger came to the foot of the table. Men made way for him. He stood there a moment in silence, dropped his gauntlets on the table and seemed peering at the Master. Then all at once he drew himself up, sharply, and saluted.

The Master returned the salute. A moment's silence followed. No man was looking elsewhere than at this interloper.

Not much could be seen of him, so swaddled was he in sheepskin jacket, aviator's helmet, and goggles. Leather trousers and leggings completed his costume. The collar of the jacket, turned up, met the helmet. Of his face, only the chin and lower part of the cheeks remained visible.

The silence tautened, stretched to the breaking-point. All at once the master of Niss'rosh demanded, incisively:

"Your name, sir?"

"Captain Alfred Alden, of the R.A.F."

"Royal Air Force man, eh? Are you prepared to prove that?"

"I am."

"If you're not, well—this won't be exactly a salubrious altitude for you."

"I have my papers, my licenses, my commission."

"With you here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well," answered the Master, "I will examine them in due time.
English, American, or—?"

"I am a Canadian." answered the aviator. "I have seen nearly two years' active service. I rank as an ace. I bear three wounds and have been cited several times. I have the Distinguished Service Cross. What more need I tell you, sir?"

His voice was steady and rang true. The Master nodded approval, that seemed to echo round the room in a buzz of acceptance. But there were still other questions to be asked. The next one was:

"How did you come here? It's obvious my man didn't bring you up."

"I came in my own plane, sir," the stranger answered, in a dead hush of stillness. "It just now landed on the roof of this building. If you will draw the curtains, there behind you, I believe you can see it for yourself."

"I heard no engine."

"I volplaned in. I don't say this to boast sir, but I can handle the average plane as accurately as most men handle their own fingers."

"Were you invited to attend this meeting by either Major Bohannan or by me?"

"No, sir, I was not."

"Then, why are you here?"

"Why am I here? For exactly the same reason that all the rest are here, sir!" The aviator swept his arm comprehensively at the ranks of eagerly listening men. "To resume active service. To get back to duty. To live, again! In short, to join this expedition and to share all its adventures!"

"Hm! Either that, or to interfere with us."

"Not the latter, sir! I swear that!"

"How did you know there was going to be an expedition, at all?" demanded the Master, his brows tensed, lips hard, eyes very keen. The aviator seemed smiling, as he answered:

"I know many things. Some may be useful to you all. I am offering you my skill and knowledge, such as they may be, without any thought or hope of reward."

"Why?"

"Because I am tired of life. Because I want—must have—the freedom of the open roads, the inspiration of some great adventure! Surely, you understand."

"Yes, if what you say is true, and you are not a spy. Show us your face, sir!"

The aviator loosened his helmet and removed it, disclosing a mass of dark hair, a well-shaped head and a vigorous neck. Then he took off his goggles.

A kind of communal whisper of astonishment and hostility ran round the apartment. The man's whole face—save for eyeholes through which dark pupils looked strangely out—was covered by a close-fitting, flesh-colored celluloid mask.

This mask reached from the roots of his hair to his mouth. It sloped away down the left jaw, and somewhat up the cheekbone of the right side. The mask was firmly strapped in place around the head and neck.

"What does all this mean, sir?" demanded the Master, sharply. "Why the mask?"

"Is that a necessary question, sir?" replied the aviator, while a buzz of curiosity and suspicion rose. "You have seen many such during the war and since its close."

"Badly disfigured, are you?"

"That word, 'disfigured,' does not describe it, sir. Others have wounds, but my whole face is nothing but a wound. No, let me put it more accurately—there is, practically speaking, no face at all. The gaping cavity that exists under this mask would certainly sicken the strongest men among you, and turn you against me.

"We can't tolerate what disgusts, even if its qualities be excellent. In exposing myself to you, sir, I should certainly be insuring my rejection. But what you cannot see, what you can only imagine, will not make you refuse me."

The Master pondered a moment, then nodded and asked:

"Is it so very bad, sir?"

"It's a thing of horror, incredible, awful, unreal! In the hospital at Rouen, they called me 'The Kaiser's Masterpiece.' Some of the most hardened surgeons couldn't look at me, or dress my—wound, let us call it—without a shudder. Ordinary men would find me intolerable, if they could see me.

"Unmasked, I bear no resemblance whatever to a man, but rather to some ghastly, drug-inspired dream or nightmare of an Oriental Dante. The fact that I have sacrificed my human appearance in the Great Cause cannot overcome the shrinking aversion that normal men would feel, if they could see me. I say only this, that my mutilation is indescribable. As the officer and gentleman I know you to be, you won't ask me to expose this horror!"

CHAPTER IV

THE MASKED RECRUIT

A little silence lengthened, while the strange aviator continued to peer out with strangely shining eyes through the holes of his mask. The effect of that human intelligence, sheltered in there behind that expressionless celluloid, whose frail thinness they all knew covered unspeakable frightfulness, became uncanny.

Some of the men eased the tension by blowing ribbons of smoke or by relighting tobacco that had gone out while the stranger had been talking. Others shifted, a bit uneasily. Voices began to mutter, pro and con. The Master suddenly knocked again, for silence.

"I am going to accept this man," said he, sharply. "You notice I do not put this to a vote, or consult you about it. Nor shall I, in anything. The prime condition of this whole undertaking, as I was saying when Captain Alden here arrived, is unquestioning obedience to my authority.

"No one who is unwilling to swear that, need go any further. You must have confidence in my plans, my judgment. And you must be willing to obey. It is all very autocratic, I know, but the expedition cannot proceed on any other basis.

"You are to go where I will, act as I command, and only regain your liberty when the undertaking is at an end. I shall not order any man to go anywhere, or do anything, that I would not do myself. On this you can rely.

"In case of my death, the authority falls on Major Bohannan. He is today the only man who knows my plans, and with whom I have had any discussion. If we both are killed, then you can elect your own leader. But so long as either of us lives, you have no authority and no redress. I hope that's perfectly understood. Does any man wish to withdraw?"

Not one budged. All stood to their decision, hard as rock.

"Very well," said the Master, grimly. "But remember, disobedience incurs the death penalty, and it will be rigorously enforced. My word is to be supreme.

"Such being the case, I decide to take this man. His skill as an aviator cannot be denied. We shall need that. His ability to endure suffering and still remain efficient seems proved. That may be valuable; probably will be.

"I shall examine his credentials. If he turns out to be a spy—well, life will be short, for him."

He addressed himself to the masked aviator, who was still standing in an attitude of military attention.

"You are now one of us, sir. You become the thirtieth member of a little group of as brave men, as daring and determined fighters as can be found in America or in the world—all tried and tempered by the fires of war; all decorated for conspicuous valor; all ready to follow me to the ends of the earth and die, if need be; all eager to share in an undertaking as yet unknown to them, but one that promises to be the most extraordinary adventure ever undertaken on this planet. You understand all that, sir?"

"I do!"

"Raise your right hand, sir."

The aviator obeyed.

"All the others, too!"

Every hand went up.

"Swear allegiance to me, fidelity, secrecy, courage, obedience. On the thing you hold most dear, your honor as fighting-men, swear it!"

The shout that answered him, from every throat, made the eagle's nest ring with wild echoes. The Master smiled, as the hands sank.

"With men like you," said he, "failure is impossible. The expedition is to start at once, tomorrow night. No man in it has now any ties or home or kin that overbalance his ties to me and to the esprit de corps of our body.

"The past is dead, for you. The future is all a mystery. You are to live only in the present, day by day. And now for some practical details.

"The means of transport you do not know. The perils and rewards are problematical. Of the former there will be enough; as for the latter, those lie on the knees of the gods. There will be no payment for any man. Not a cent of money is involved in this service.

"Commissary will be furnished. Each man is to wear his campaign equipment—his uniform and such kit as he can store in a rucksack. Bring small-arms and ammunition. In addition, I will furnish bombing material and six Lewis guns, with ammunition, also other materials of which I shall now say nothing. These things will be transported to the proper place without labor on your part. I think I have made the outlines of the matter reasonably clear to every man present."

"Our orders, sir?" asked a voice with a French accent, down the table.
"Are we to have no precise orders before leaving this room?"

"You are. Each man will receive his own, sealed, before leaving. I am now about to give them out, in alphabetical rotation. This will dismiss the meeting. You will withdraw as inconspicuously as you came. Remember, you are to become as cogs in the machine that I have devised. At the exact place, hour, minute, and second you are to do exactly the thing ordered, and nothing else. Neglect, disobedience, or failure will positively not be condoned, but will be punished as I see fit, even to the death penalty.

"Come forward now, as I call your names, and receive what I shall give you."

He opened a drawer in the table, took out many small boxes and arranged them before him. Each box was carefully wrapped in stout paper, securely tied, and sealed with red wax.

Standing there, firm, impassive, with narrowed eyes, he began reading the names:

"Adams—Auchincloss—Brodeur—Cracowicz—Daimamoto—Emilio—Frazier—"

As each man's name was uttered he came down along the table, took the box extended to him, thrust it into his pocket, saluted stiffly, and withdrew in silence. At the end of a few minutes, no one was left but the Master, Bohannan, and the man in the celluloid mask.

"Have you no orders for me, sir?" asked the aviator, still erect in his place at the far end of the table. His eyes shone out darkly through his shield.

"None, sir."

"All the others—"

"You are different." The Master set hands on his hips, and coldly studied this strange figure. "The others have had their orders carefully worked out for them, prepared, synchronized. You have come, so to speak, as an extemporization, an auxiliary; you will add one more unit to the flyers in the expedition, of which there are nine aces, including Major Bohannan here. The others are now on their way to their lodgings, to study their instructions, to memorize, and prepare to carry them out. You are to remain here, with Major Bohannan and with me."

"Until what time, sir?"

"Until we start. You will be under continual surveillance. If you make any attempt to communicate in any way with anyone outside my apartment, it will be the last thing you will ever do. You will receive no other warning. Tomorrow night you will accompany us. Till then, you remain my—guest."

The aviator nodded.

"Very well, sir," he accepted. "But, my machine?"

"I will attend to your machine."

"I should hate to leave it there on the roof."

"It will not be left on the roof."

"I don't understand, exactly—"

"There will be very many things you do not understand before this expedition is over and done with. I need say no more."

Sharply he clapped his hands, thrice. In a moment, Rrisa appeared at the door. The Master spoke a few guttural, aspirated words of Arabic. Rrisa beckoned the stranger, who obeyed.

At the exit he faced about and sharply saluted. The Master returned it. Then he vanished, and the door noiselessly closed behind them.

The Master turned to Bohannan.

"Now," said he, "these few last details. Time is growing very short.
Only a few hours remain. To work, Major—to work!"

At this same moment Auchincloss had already arrived at his rooms in the McAlpine; and there, having carefully locked his door, had settled himself at his desk with his sealed box before him.

For a moment he studied it under the electric light. Then, breaking the wax with fingers tensed by eagerness, he tore it open. He spread the contents on his blotting-pad. There was a small pocket-compass of the best quality, a plain-cased watch wound up and going, a map and a folded sheet of paper covered with typewriting. Auchincloss fell to reading:

GENERAL ORDERS

You are to learn your specific orders by heart, and then destroy this paper. You are to act on these orders, irrespective of every other man. You are not to communicate the contents of this paper to any other. This might upset the pre-arranged plan. You might try to join forces, assist each other, or exercise some mistaken judgment that might result in ruin. Each man is to keep his orders an absolute secret. This is vital.

Each man, like yourself, is provided with a map, a watch, and a compass. These watches are all self-luminous, all accurately adjusted to synchronize to the second, and all will run forty-eight hours.

SPECIFIC ORDERS

Tomorrow, proceed inconspicuously to Tenafly, New Jersey, and hire a room at the Cutter Inn. Carry your kit in a suit-case. At 7:30 p.m., go to Englewood. Go up Englewood Avenue toward the Palisades, turn left (north) along the road near edge of cliff; proceed half a mile and enter woods at your right. There you will find path marked "A" on your map. Put on rucksack and discard suit-case, which, of course, is to have no identifying marks. Proceed along path to point "B," and from under board you will find there take box with weapon enclosed. Box will also contain vacuum searchlight and directions for use of weapon, exact time, direction, and elevation for discharging same, and further instructions how to proceed. Act on these to the second. If interfered with, kill; but kill quietly, so as to avoid giving the alarm.

I expect every man to do his duty to the full. There will be but one excuse for failure, and that is death.

The Master.

CHAPTER V

IN THE NIGHT

The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from the foot of Twenty-seventh Street.

This launch contained four men. They carried but little baggage; no more than could be stowed in a rucksack apiece. All were in their old service uniforms, with long coats over the uniforms to mask them. All carried vacuum-flashlights in their overcoat pockets, and lethal-gas pistols, in addition to ordinary revolvers or automatics. And all were keyed to the top notch of energy, efficiency, eagerness. The Great Adventure had begun.

In the stern of the swift, twenty-four cylinder launch—a racing model—sat Captain Alden and Rrisa. The captain wore his aviator's helmet and his goggles, despite the warmth of the night. To appear in only his celluloid mask, even at a time like this when darkness would have hidden him, seemed distasteful to the man. He seemed to want to hide his misfortune as fully as possible; and, since this did no harm, the Master let him have his way.

The bow was occupied by the Master and by Major Bohannan, with the Master at the wheel. He seemed cool, collected, impassive; but the major, of hotter Celtic blood, could not suppress his fidgety nervousness.

Intermittently he gnawed at his reddish mustache. A cigar, he felt, would soothe and quiet him. Cigars, however, were now forbidden. So were pipes and cigarettes. The Master did not intend to have even their slight distraction coming between the minds of his men and the careful, intricate plan before them.

As the racer veered north, up the broad darkness of the Hudson—the Hudson sparkling with city illumination on either hand, with still or moving ships' lights on the breast of the waters—Bohannan murmured:

"Even now, as your partner in this enterprise—"

"My lieutenant," corrected the Master.

"As second in command," amended Bohannan, irritably, "I'm not wholly convinced this is the correct procedure." He spoke in low tones, covered by the purring exhaust of the launch and by the hiss of swiftly cloven waters. "It looks like unnecessary complication, to me, and avoidable danger."

"It is neither," answered the man at the wheel. "What would you have done? What better plan could you have proposed?"

"You could have built your own flyer, couldn't you? Since money's no object to you, and you don't even know, accurately, how much you've got—nobody can keep track of figures like those—why risk legal interference and international complications at the start, by—"

"To build the kind of flyer we need would have taken six or seven months. Not all my money could have produced it, sooner. And absolute ennui can't wait half a year. I'd have gone wholly stale, and so would you, and all of them. We'd have lost them.

"Again, news of any such operations would have got out. My plans would possibly have been checkmated. In the third place, what you propose would have been tame sport, indeed, as a beginning! Three excellent reasons, my dear Major, why this is positively the only way."

"Perhaps. But there's always the chance of failure, now. The guards—"

"After your own experience, when that capsule burst in the laboratory, you talk to me about guards?"

"Suppose one escapes?"

The Master only smiled grimly, and sighted his course up the dark river.

"And the alarm is sure to be given, in no time. Why didn't you just buy the thing outright?"

"It's not for sale, at any price."

"Still—men can't run off with three and a half million dollars' worth of property and with provisions and equipment like that, all ready for a trial trip, without raising Hell. There'll be pursuit—"

"What with, my dear Bohannan?"

"That's a foolish statement of mine, the last one, I admit," answered
the major, as his companion swung the launch a little toward the
Jersey shore. "Of course nothing can overhaul us, once we're away.
But you know my type of mind weighs every possibility, pro and con.
Wireless can fling out a fan of swift aerial police ahead of us from
Europe."

"How near can anything get to us?"

"I know it all looks quite simple and obvious, in theory.
Nevertheless—"

"Men of your character are useful, in places," said the Master, incisively. "You are good in a charge, in sudden daring, in swift attack. But in the approach to great decisions, you vacillate. That's your racial character.

"I'm beginning to doubt my own wisdom in having chosen you as next in command. There's a bit of doubting Thomas in your ego. It's not too late, yet, for you to turn back. I'll let you, as a special concession. Brodeur will jump at the chance to be your successor."

His hand swung the wheel, sweeping the racer in a curve toward the Manhattan shore. Bohannan angrily pushed the spokes over again the other way.

"I stick!" he growled. "I've said the last word of this sort you'll ever hear me utter. Full speed ahead—to Paradise—or Hell!"

They said no more. The launch split her way swiftly toward the north. By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile appeared on the steersman's lips. In his dark eyes gleamed the joy which to some men ranks supreme above all other joys—that of bending others to his will, of dominating them, of making them the puppets of his fancy.

Some quarter hour the racer hummed upriver. Keenly the Master kept his lookout, picking up landmarks. Finally he spoke a word to Captain Alden, who came forward to the engines. The Master's cross-questionings of this man had convinced him his credentials were genuine and that he was loyal, devoted, animated by nothing but the same thirst for adventure that formed the driving power behind them all. Now he was trusting him with much, already.

"Three quarters speed," ordered the Master. The skilled hand of the captain, well-versed in the operation of gas engines, obeyed the command. The whipping breeze of their swift course, the hiss at the bows as foam and water crumbled out and over, somewhat diminished. The goal lay not far off.

To starboard, thinning lights told the Master they were breasting Spuyten Duyvil. To port, only a few scattered gleams along the base of the cliff or atop it, showed that the sparsely settled Palisades were drawing abeam. The ceaseless, swarming activities of the metropolis were being left behind. Silence was closing in, broken only by vagrant steamer-whistles from astern.

A crawling string of lights, on the New York shore, told that an express was hurling itself cityward. Its muffled roar began to echo out over the star-flecked waters. The Master threw a scornful glance at it. He turned in his seat, and peered at the shimmer of the city's lights, strung like a luminous rosary along the river's edge. Then he looked up at the roseate flush on the sky, flung there by the metropolis as from the mouth of a crucible.

"Child's play!" he murmured. "All this coming and going in crowded streets, all this fighting for bread, and scheming over pennies—child's play. Less than that—the blind swarming of ants! Tomorrow, where will all this be, for us?"

He turned back and thrust over the spokes. The launch drew in toward the Jersey shore.

"Let the engines run at half-speed," he directed, "and control her now with the clutch."

"Yes, sir!"

The aviator's voice was sharp, precise, determined. The Master nodded to himself with satisfaction. This man, he felt, would surely be a valued member of the crew. He might prove more than that. There might be stuff in him that could be molded to executive ability, in case that should be necessary.

The launch, now at half-speed, nosed her way directly toward the cliff. Sounds from shore began to grow audible Afar, an auto siren shrieked. A dog barked, irritatingly. A human voice came vaguely hallooing.

Off to the right, over the cliff brow, a faint aura of light was visible. The eyes of the Master rested on this a moment, brightening. He smiled again; and his hand tightened a little on the wheel. But all he said was:

"Dead slow, now, Captain Alden!"

As the cliff drew near, its black brows ate across the sky, devouring stars. The Master spoke in Arabic to Rrisa, who seized a boat hook and came forward. Out of the gloom small wharf advanced to meet the launch. The boat-hook caught; the launch, easing to a stop, cradled against the stringpiece.

Rrisa held with the hook, while Bohannan and Alden clambered out. Before the Master left, he bent and seemed to be manipulating something in the bottom of the launch. Then he stepped to the engine.

"Out, Rrisa," he commanded, "and hold hard with the hook, now!"

The Arab obeyed. All at once the propeller churned water, reversed.
The Master leaped to the wharf.

"Let go—and throw the hook into the boat!" he ordered.

While the three others stood wondering on the dark wharf, the launch began to draw slowly back into the stream. Already it was riding a bit low, going down gradually by the bows.

"What now?" questioned the major, astonished.

"She will sink a hundred or two yards from shore, in deep water," answered the Master, calmly. "The sea-cock is wide open."

"A fifteen thousand dollar launch—!"

"Is none the less, a clue. No man of this party, reaching the shore tonight, is leaving any more trace than we are. Come, now, all this is trivial. Forward!"

In silence, they followed him along the dark wharf, reached a narrow, rocky path that serpented up the face of the densely wooded cliff, and began to ascend. A lathering climb it was, laden as they were with heavy rucksacks, in the moonless obscurity.

Now and then the Master's little searchlight—his own wonderful invention, a heatless light like an artificial firefly, using no batteries nor any power save universal, etheric rays in an absolute vacuum—glowed with pale virescence over some particularly rough bit of going. For the most part, however, not even this tiny gleam was allowed to show. Silence, darkness, precision, speed were now all-requisite.

Twenty-four minutes from leaving the wharf, they stood among a confused, gigantic chaos of boulders flung, dicelike, amid heavy timbers on the brow of the Palisades. Off to the north, the faint, ghostly aura dimly silhouetted the trees. Far below, the jetty river trembled here, there, with starlight.

They paused a moment to breathe, to shift straps that bound shoulders not now hardened to such burdens. The Master glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch.

"Almost to the dot," he whispered. "Seventeen minutes to midnight. At midnight, sharp, we take possession. Come!"

They trailed through a hard, rocky path among thick oak, pine, and silver-birch. Now and then the little greenish-white light will-o'-the-wisped ahead, flickering hither, yon. No one spoke a word. Every footstep had to be laid down with care. After three minutes' progress, the Master stopped, turned, held up his hand.

"Absolute silence, now," he breathed. "The outer guards are now within an eighth of a mile."

They moved forward again. The light was no longer shown, but the Master confidently knew the way. Bohannan felt a certain familiarity with the terrain, which he had carefully studied on the large-scale map he and the Master had used in planning the attack; but the Master's intimate knowledge was not his. After two and one-half minutes, the leader stopped again, and gestured at heavy fern-brakes that could just be distinguished as black blotches in the dark of the woods.

"The exact spot," he whispered. "Take cover, and follow your memorized orders!"

He settled down noiselessly into the brakes. The others did likewise. Utter silence fell, save for the far, vague roar of the city. A vagrant little breeze was stirring the new foliage, through which a few stars curiously peeped. The four men seemed far, very far from any others. And yet—

Were there any others near them? the major wondered. No sign, no sound of them existed. Off to northward, where the dim glow ghosted up against the sky, an occasional noise drifted to the night. A distant laugh diffused itself through the dark. A dog yapped; perhaps the same that they had heard barking, a few minutes before. Then came the faint, sharp tapping of a hammer smiting metal.

"They're knocking out the holding-pins," thought the major. "In a few minutes it'll be too late, if we don't strike now!" He felt a great temptation to urge haste, on the Master. But, aware of the futility of any suggestion, the risk of being demoted for any other faux pas, he bridled his impatience and held still.

Realizing that they were now lying at the exact distance of 440 yards from the stockade that protected the thing they had come to steal—if you can call "stealing" the forced sale the Master now planned consummating, by having his bankers put into unwilling hands every ultimate penny of the more than $3,500,000 involved, once the coup should be put through—realizing this fact, Bohannan felt the tug of a profound excitement.

His pulses quickened; the tension of his Celtic nerves keyed itself up like a banjo-string about to snap. Steeled in the grim usages of war though he was, and more than once having felt the heart-breaking stress of the zero hour, this final moment of waiting, of suspense before the attack that was so profoundly to affect his life and the lives of all these other hardy men, pulled heavily at his nerves. He desperately wanted a smoke, again, but that was out of the question. It seemed to him, there in the dark and stillness, one of the fateful moments of time, pregnant with possibilities unlimited.

The Master, Alden, Rrisa, mere vague blurs among the ferns, remained motionless. If their nerves were a-tingle, they gave no hint or sign of it. Where might the others of the Legion be? No indication of them could be made out. No other living thing seemed in the woods encircling the stockade. Was each man really there and ready for the predetermined role he was to play?

It seemed incredible, fantastic, to suppose that all these adventurers, each separate and alone, each having no contact, with any other, should all have taken their assigned posts. That each, with luminous watch on wrist, was even now timing himself, to the second, before striking the single note calculated to produce, in harmony with all the rest, the finished composition. Such an assumption partook more of the stuff of an Arabian Nights tale than of stern reality in this Twentieth Century and on the outskirts of the world's greatest city.

The Master, crouching, whispered:

"Two minutes more! Keep your eyes on your watches, now. Get your lethal guns ready! In 120 seconds, you will hear the first capsule burst. Ten seconds after that, Alden, fire yours. Ten later, yours, Bohannan. Ten later, yours, Rrisa. Listen hard! Hold steady!"

The silence drew at them like a pain. Rrisa breathed something in which the words: "La Illaha ilia Allah" transpired in a wraith of sound. Alden nestled closer into the ferns. Bohannan could hardly hold his poise.

All three now had their capsule pistols ready. The self-luminous compass and level attached to each gun gave them their exact direction and elevation. Glimmering watches marked the time, the dragging of the last few seconds.

The Master drew no weapon. His mind, directing all, observing all, was not to be distracted by even so small a detail as any personal hand in the discharge of the lethal gas.

If he felt the strain of the final moment, on which hung vaster issues than mere life or death, he gave no indication of it. His eyes remained fixed on the watch-dial at his wrist. They were confident, those eyes. The vague shimmer of the watch-glow showed them dark and grave; his face, faintly revealed, was impassive, emotionless.

It seemed the face of a scientist, a chemist who—having worked out his formula to its ultimate minutiae—now felt utter trust in its reactions, now was only waiting to observe what he well knew must inevitably happen.

"Thirty seconds more," he whispered, and fell silent. Presently, after what seemed half an hour: "Fifteen!"

Another long wait. The Master breathed:

"In just five seconds the first capsule will burst there!" He pointed with assurance. "In two—in one—"

CHAPTER VI

THE SILENT ATTACK

At the exact instant when the second hand notched to the minute's edge, and in precisely the spot indicated, a slight, luminous spot became dimly visible above the trees. The spot took uncertain form high above the ghost-glow rising from the unseen stockade. For an instant it hung suspended, pale-greenish, evanescent.

Then, as a faint plop! drifted to the watchers—a sound no louder than a feeble clack of the tongue—this indefinite luminosity began to sink, to fade, falling slowly, gradually dissipating itself in the dim light over the stockade.

The Master nodded, smiling, with never any hint of praise or approbation. The fulfilment of his order was to him no other than it is to you, when you drop a pebble into water, to hear the splash of it. That his plan should be working out, seemed to him a perfectly obvious, inevitable thing. The only factor that could possibly have astonished him, just now, would have been the nonappearance of that slight, luminous cloudlet at the precise spot and moment designated.

Neither Bohannan, Alden, nor Rrisa was watching the slow descent of the lethal gas. All three had their eyes fixed on their own lethal-gas pistols and on their watches. At mathematically the correct second, Bohannan discharged his piece, correctly sighting direction and elevation.

As he pressed trigger, a light sighing eased itself from the slim barrel. Something flicked through the leaves; and, almost on the instant, the phenomenon of the little phosphorescent spot repeated itself, though in a different place from the first one. Captain Alden's and Rrisa's shots produced still other blurs of virescence.

Then, as they all waited, crouching, came another and another tiny explosion, high aloft, at precisely ten-second intervals. Here, there, they developed, until twenty-nine of these strange, bubble-like things had burst above and all about the huge enclosure. Then darkness and silence once more settled down.

Nothing seemed to have happened. Night still reigned, starry with glimpses of sky through wind-swayed trees. One would have said everything still remained precisely as it had been before.

Yet presently, within the stockade or near it, a certain uneasy mélange of sounds began to develop. Here a cry became audible, there a command. A startled voice called an order, but suddenly fell silent, half-way through it. The worrying of the dog ceased with eloquent suddenness. A curse died, unfinished.

And silence, as perfect as the silence of the unseen watchers strung all about the periphery of the stockade, once more dominated the night.

For precisely ten minutes, nothing broke that silence—minutes during all of which the Master remained calmly waiting, with grave confidence. Bohannan shuddered a little. His Celtic imagination was at work, again. Uncanny the attack seemed to him, unreal and ghostlike. So, perhaps, might strange, unbelievable creatures from some other planet attack and conquer the world, noiselessly, gently, irrevocably.

This assault was different from any other ever made since man and man first began battling together in the dim twilights of the primeval. Not with shout and cheer did it rush forward, nor yet with venomous gases that gave the alarm, that choked, that strangled, that tortured.

Silence and concealment, and the invisible blight of sleep, like the greater numbing that once fell on the hosts of Sennacherib, enfolded all opposition. All who would have stood against the Legion, simply sighed once, perhaps spoke a few disjointed words, then sank into oblivion.

So far as anyone could see, save for the bursting of twenty-nine insignificant little light-bubbles, in mid-air, nothing at all had happened. And yet tremendously much had happened, inside the huge stockade.

Ten minutes to a dot had drifted by, seeming at least six times as long, when all at once the Master stood up.

"The gas has dissipated enough now," said he, "so that we can advance in safety. Come!"

The three also arose, half at his command, half from the independent impulses given them by their watches as these came to the designated second for the forward movement. The Master blew no whistle, gave no signal to the many others scattered all through those darkly silent woods; but right and left, and over beyond the stockade, he knew with the precision of a mathematical equation every man was at that exact moment also arising, also obeying orders, also preparing to close in on the precious thing whereof they meant to make themselves the owners.

Forward the Master made his way, with the three others of his immediate escort. Though there no longer existed any need of silence, hardly a word was spoken. Something vast, imminent, overpowering, seemed to have laid its finger on the lips of all, to have muted them of speech.

The vacuum-lights, however, were now freely flashing in the little party, as it advanced directly toward the stockade. The men clambered over rocks, through bushes, across fallen logs. Rrisa stopped, suddenly, played his light on a little bundle of gray fur, and touched it with a curious finger. It was a squirrel, curled into a tiny ball of oblivion.

Alden's foot narrowly missed the body of a sleeping robin. An owl, lodged in the fork of a tree, moved not as the men passed. It, too, was whelmed in deep, temporary Nirvana.

The party's next find arrested them, with a thrill of genuine emotion, a triumph that could not be denied some few half-whispered exclamations of exultation from the Master's three companions. He himself was the only one who spoke no word. But, like the others, he had stopped and was pointing the beam of his light on the figure lying inert among broken bushes.

With his toe he touched this figure. His light picked up the man's face from the gloom. That face was looking at him with wide-open eyes. The eyes saw nothing; but a kind of overwhelming astonishment still seemed mirrored there, caught in the last moment of consciousness as the man had fallen.

The effect was startling, of that sleeping face, those open eyes, that lax mouth. The man was breathing easily, peacefully as a tired child. The Master's brows contracted a little. His lips tightened. Then he nodded, and smiled the ghost of a smile.

"Lord!" exclaimed Bohannan, half awed by the weirdness of the apparition. "Staring at us, that way—and all! Is he asleep?"

"Try him in any way your ingenuity may suggest," answered the Master, while Alden blinked strangely through his eyeholes, and Rrisa in Arabic affirmed that there is no God but Allah. "Try to force some sense-impression to his brain. It is sleep, but it is more than that. The best experiment for any doubting Thomas to employ is just to waken this guard—if possible."

Bohannan shook his head.

"No," he answered, "I'm not going to make a fool of myself. There's no going against any of your statements. I'm beginning to find that out, definitely. Let's be on our way!"

The Master spoke a few quick words of Arabic to his orderly. Rrisa knelt by the prostrate man. Then, while the Master kept the light-beam on him, Rrisa unbuckled the guard's belt, with cartridges and holster containing an ugly snouted gun. This belt the Arab slung round his own body. He arose. In silence, leaving the unconscious man just as he had fallen, they once more pushed onward.

Lights were beginning to gleam ahead, now, in what appeared to be a long, high line. The trees half hid them, but moment by moment they appeared more distinctly. Meantime, too, the glow over the stockade was getting stronger. Presently the trees ceased; and there before them the men saw a wide, cleared space, a hundred feet of empty land between the woods and a tall, stout fence topped with live wires and with numerous incandescents.

"Nice place to tackle, if anybody were left to defend it!" commented Bohannan. None of the others answered. The Master started diagonally across the cleared space, toward a cluster of little buildings and stout gate-posts.

Hardly had they emerged from the woods, when, all up and down the line, till it was broken by the woods at both ends where the stockade joined its eastern and western wall, other men began appearing. And all, alike, converged toward the gate.

But to these, the little party of four gave no heed. Other men absorbed their interest—sleeping men, now more and more thickly scattered all along the stockade. Save for a slight, saline tang to the air—an odor by no means unpleasant—nothing remained of the lethal gas.

But its victims still lay there, prone, in every possible attitude of complete and overpowering abandonment. And all, as the party of four passed, were quickly disarmed. Up and down the open space, other Legionaries were at the same work.

The Master and his companions reached the gate-house first of any in the party. The gate was massive, of stout oaken planks heavily strapped with iron. About it, and the gate-house, a good many guards were lying. All showed evidence of having dropped asleep with irresistible suddenness.

Some were gaping, others foolishly grinning as if their last sensation had been agreeable—as indeed it had been—while others stared disconcertingly. The chin of one showed an ugly burn where his Turkish cigarette had sagged, and had smoldered to extinction on the flesh.

One had a watch in his hand, while another gripped a newspaper. In the gate-house, two had fallen face downward on the table that occupied the center of the rough room; checker-pieces lay scattered from the game they had been playing. Several men sprawled just outside the little house, on the platform. Under the incandescents, the effect grew weird.

Bohannan shuddered, as he glanced from one to another, then up at some of the approaching men of the expedition. Rrisa affirmed that Mohammed was indeed the prophet of Allah, and that the ways of the Nasara were most strange.

"Good!" exclaimed the Master, with his first word of approval. Even his aplomb was a little shaken by the complete success of the attack. "It's all working like a clock."

"How about disarming these men, sir?" queried Captain Alden.

"No. They fall under the orders of another group."

"The way is clear, then—"

"Absolutely! These men will sleep almost precisely thirty minutes. The way is clear ahead of us. Forward into the Palisade!"

CHAPTER VII

THE NEST OF THE GREAT BIRD

As the little group of four penetrated into the enclosure which but a few moments before had been guarded all round its perimeter by a small army of determined men, more and more of the Legionaries began to concentrate toward the entrance.

Silently they came, with almost the precision of automata in some complex mechanical process. All were obeying the Master's will, because obedience was sweet to them; because it spelled adventure, freedom, life.

Now and then one stopped, bent, arose with some added burden taken from a fallen guard. Not one guard was to be injured in any manner. Human life was not to be taken. But nothing in the way of armament was to be left, by way of possible danger to the Legion. And already the telephone-wires had been effectively cut.

All the approaching Legionaries wore rucksacks, and all were in their respective uniforms, though every man still wore a long coat that concealed it. A few groups of two appeared, bearing rather heavy burdens.

The Master smiled again, and nodded, as he paused a moment at the gate to peer down, along the line of the clearing between stockade and forest.

"Here come some of the machine-guns," said he. "I shall be vastly surprised if one man or one single bit of equipment fails to appear on schedule time. Nothing like system, Bohannan—that, and knowing how to choose your men!"

He turned, and the other three followed him into the enclosure. Outside, all was developing according to plans and specifications. They four were to be pioneers into the jealously guarded space that for so long had been the mystery of the continent, yes, of the civilized world.

The whole enclosure was well lighted with a profusion of electric lamps. At first view, quite a bewildering mass of small buildings appeared; but second glance showed order in them all. Streets had been laid out, as in a town; and along these streets stood drafting-sheds, workshops, storehouses, commissary offices, dwellings for the workers, guards, and bosses. A well-built cottage on the main, forward-going road that led from the gate to an inner stockade, was probably headquarters for the chief engineers.

Not one sign of conscious life appeared. Men were lying here, there, in the roadways, in the porches, in the shadow of the power-plant where dynamos were still merrily singing. Few were armed. Most of them here were workers, judging by their garb and by the tools still in some hands.

The four pioneers gave them no heed, but pushed steadily on. In the road lay a couple of pigeons, farther on a sparrow, and still farther a sleeping dog, showed how complete had been the effect of the lethal pellets.

The inner stockade was now close. It stood about twice as high as the outer, was also topped with live wires and lights, and was loopholed for defense. This formidable barrier was pierced by a small gate, flanked by two machine-guns. On the gate-post was affixed an elaborate set of rules regarding those who might and might not enter. The Master smiled dryly, and opened the gate.

Even from without, the loom of the monstrous airship had been visible. The eye could hardly at first glance take in the vastness of this stupendous thing, that overshadowed all the central portion of the huge enclosure. It gave a sense of power, of swift potentialities, of speed unlimited. It stood there, tense, ready, waiting, with a hum of engines audible in its vast heart, a thing almost of life, man's creation but how illimitably greater than man!

For a moment, as this tremendous winged fabric came to the Master's view, he halted, and a look of exultation, pride, and joy came over his face. But only for a moment. Quite at once his dark eyes veiled themselves with their habitual impassivity. Once more he strode forward, the others following him.

Now that they were inside the second barrier—where sleeping men were scattered more thickly than ever—they stood under the very wings of the most stupendous hydroplane ever conceived by the brain of man or executed by the cunning of his hand.

That this hydroplane had been almost on the moment of departure for its trial trip, was proved by the sleepers. Two were on the gangplank leading up to the entrance door in the fuselage. A number who had been knocking out the last holding-pins of the last shackles that bound it to its cradle, had fallen to earth, their sledge-hammers near at hand.

In the pilot-house, a figure had collapsed across the sill of an observation window. And the engines, purring softly, told that all had been in readiness for the throwing-in of the clutches that would have set the vast propellers spinning with roaring speed.

"Yes, they were certainly just on the dot of getting away," said the
Master, nodding as he glanced at his watch. "This couldn't be better.
Gas, oil, stores, everything ready. What more proof do you require, my
dear Bohannan, of the value of exact coordination?"

The major could only answer: "Yes, yes—" He seemed quite amazed by this extraordinary mechanism—gigantic, weird, unreal in the garish electric lights. Rrisa was frankly staring, for once shaken out of his fatalistic Mussulman tranquillity.

As for Captain Alden, he stood there a compact, small figure in his long coat with the rucksack strapped to his shoulders, peering up with the eye of the connoisseur. His smile was of contentment absolute.

"My beauty—ah, my beauty!" he was murmuring.

Then, in the presence of this mighty thing, silence fell on all. The major set hands on hips, blinked, puckered his lips, and silently whistled. His expression was half incredulous, half enthusiastic.

What Alden was thinking revealed itself by the sparkle of his eyes through the holes of the mask behind the goggles. Expressionless though that terribly mutilated face had to remain, you could sense in the man's whole attitude the exultation of the expert ace as he beheld the perfect machine.

The droning of the engines came distinctly to them all, a low, steady, powerful note, beautiful in its steady undertones of strength. Behind the little group, a few involuntary exclamations of astonishment and joy became audible, as some of the Legionaries came into the second enclosure.

Without, blows on metal sharply resounded. The Master smiled again, as he realized his orders were going on with exact precision.

"That's the wireless they're putting out of commission," thought he, glancing at his watch again. "No mere untuning of wave-lengths. Good, old-fashioned hammer-blows! This station won't work again for a while!"

Bohannan, meantime, was trying to get some general impression of the giant plane. Not all the Master's descriptions of it, to him, had quite prepared him for the reality. Though he well knew all the largest, biggest machines in the world, this stupendous creation staggered him. By comparison with the Handley-Page, the Caproni, the D.H.-4, the Gotha 90-120, the Sikorsky, it spread itself as an eagle spreads beside a pigeon.

It lay in a kind of metallic cradle, almost like a ship ready for launching on its ways. Ahead of it, metal plates stretched away like rails, running toward the lip of the Palisades. Its quadruple floats, each the size of a tugboat and each capable of being exhausted of air, constituted a potential lifting-force of enclosed vacuums that very largely offset the weight of the mechanism. It was still a heavier-than-air machine, but the balance could be made nearly perfect. And the six helicopters, whose cylindrical, turbine-like drums gleamed with metallic glitters—three on each side along the fuselage—could at will produce an absolutely static condition of lift or even make the plane hover and soar quite vertically.

There the monster lay, outstretching its enormous sextuple wings, each wing with an area of 376 by 82.5 feet. The non-inflammable celluloid surfaces shone white as fresh-cut ivory, clean, smooth, unbreakable. The plane reminded one of some Brobdingnagian dragon-fly, resting for flight, shimmering with power as it poised for one swift leap aloft into the night.

Bohannan, still a bit confused, noted the absence of any exhaust from the speeding engines. This, too, gave a sense of vast, self-contained power. He saw stupendous propeller-blades, their varnished surfaces flicking out high-lights as the incandescents struck them. Motionless these propellers were; but something in their tense, clean sweep told of the raging cyclone to which they could whip the air, once the spinning engines should be clutched in on their shafts.

The captain's eyes wandered over the whole enormous construction, towering there above him. He saw rows of lighted windows, each cased in shining metal; a V-pointed pilot-house—the same where the still figure had dropped over the sill of the open window—a high-raised rudder of artful curve, vast as the broadside of a barn; railed galleries running along the underbody of the fuselage, between the floats and far aft of them.

Everything gleamed and flickered with bright metal, varnish, snowy celluloid. The body of the machine looked capable of housing twice as many men as the Legion numbered. But everything, after all, was quite shrunk by the overpowering sweep of the wings. These dwarfed the fast-gathering group that stood peering up at them, like pygmies under the pinions of the fabled roc in Sinbad the Sailor's story.

These stupendous wings, the captain now saw, were not braced together by hampering struts and wires, but seemed cantilevered into position, giving a clean run to the structure, great simplicity, and the acme of mechanical beauty. This giant bird of heaven lay in its nest, free of pattern, powerful beyond any air-mechanism ever built by man, almost a living thing, on whose back its captors might ride aloft defying man and nature, to whatsoever goal they chose.

"Everything is ready," said the Master. "That is quite obvious. Let us get aboard now, with no further delay, and be off!"

He drew a little notebook from his pocket, took a pencil, and faced the gathering group inside the second stockade.

"Stow your equipment," he directed "according to your orders. Ten minutes will be enough for you to unload your machine-guns and all gear, each in the assigned space. Bring out all the sleeping men and lay them down along the stockade, here. Injure no man. Valdez, are the take-off gates, over the Palisade, correctly opened?"

A dark, thin man saluted, as he answered with a Spanish accent:

"Yes, sir. Everything is ready, sir."

"Very well. Now, all to work! And then, each to his place, in engine-room, cabins, or however and where assigned. Come, come!"

As the men trailed up the gangplank, that steeply rose to the sliding door in the fuselage, the Master checked them on his list. Not one was absent. He shut the notebook with a snap, and slid it back into his pocket.

"This goes on well," he commented to the major. "So far, we are within three minutes, eighteen seconds, of schedule."

The little group of four stood waiting, watching, while the others carried out all orders, aboard. There was no hesitation, no confusion. Each had already learned the exact plan of the airship. Each knew precisely where every door led, what each passageway meant; each understood perfectly his own post and what to do there.

Two by two, Legionaries came down the gangplank, bearing limp bodies. These they laid in a row along the stockade, till seventeen had accumulated. No more came.

A figure appeared in the sliding doorway, and saluted.

"The last sleeper is out, sir," he reported.

The Master nodded, and gestured to his three companions. The group of four ascended the sharp tilt of the plank and entered the airship. As they did so, Legionaries hoisted the plank aboard, with its tackle, and lashed it to the waiting chocks. Others could be heard, in the penetralia of the vast structure, coming, going, busily at work.

The entrance door slid shut. A bolt shot home. All the Legion was now aboard, and communication with the ground had been broken.

The four men found themselves in a brightly lighted corridor that led directly across the fuselage to a similar door on the other side. This corridor was of some metal, painted a glossy white. Doors opened out of it, on either hand. Its length was just a few inches over forty-two feet. Half-way along it, a wider corridor crossed it at right angles—the main passage of the ship.

The Master led the way toward this median corridor. His tall, big-shouldered figure swung along, triumphant, impressive in the long coat, dominant and free. Followed by the other three, he turned to the left, forward of the ship.

The main corridor, like the other, was flanked by doors. Two or three stood open, giving glimpses of comfortable staterooms. The men's footfalls sounded with softened tread on a strip of thick, brown carpet that made pleasant contrast with the gleaming white walls. Light from frosted glass circles, flush with walls and ceiling, made the corridor bright as day.

The Master walked with the confident precision of one who already had passed that way a score of times. He opened the third door on the left—it slid into the wall, instead of swinging, thus economizing space—and all entered what was obviously the main saloon of the giant plane.

This saloon measured seventeen feet six inches, from corridor to windows, and twenty-nine fore-and-aft. It was furnished with a center-table, book-cases, easy-chairs, two commodious sofa-lockers, and had an excellent carpet. Bohannan noted a Victrola, with many records.

Like all parts of the ship, its lighting was splendid. Well-curtained windows gave it a homelike air. At first glance, one would have thought oneself in a rather luxurious private house; but second inspection showed all possible construction and furnishings were of aluminum alloy, of patterns designed to cut weight to the lowest minimum.

The walls bore lightly framed photographs of men famous in the annals of flying, from Santos-Dumont and the Wrights to Gruynemer and Nosworthy; also pictures of famous machines—the Spad, Bristol Fighter, Sopwith Pup, 120-135, and others. More conspicuous than any of these was a framed copy of the International Air Commission's latest condensed rules.

Signs of recent occupancy were not wanting. An extinct cigar lay on the carpet, where it had fallen from the mouth of some airman swiftly overtaken by sleep. The table bore an open cigar-box, several packs of cigarettes with loose "fags" scattered round, and a number of champagne bottles.

Two of these were opened; one had been emptied. The other had lost part of its contents. Several champagne glasses stood on the table, and one lay on its side, where perhaps a falling hand had overset it. In one of the glasses, a few last, vagrant little bubbles were still rising from the tall, hollow stem.

"Hm!" grunted the Master contemptuously. "Fools! Well—there'll be no alcohol aboard this craft!" He loosened the buckles of his rucksack, and cast the burden on one of the sofa-lockers. The others did as much.

"Shall we stow the gear in our cabins?" asked Bohannan, gesturing at the doors that led off the saloon.

"Not yet," answered the Master, glancing at the chronometer that hung beside the air-rules. "Time enough to get settled, later. Every second counts, now. We're due to start in seven minutes, you know. Rrisa will attend to all this. We three have got to be getting forward to the pilot-house."

Bohannan nodded.

"Let's have some air in here, anyhow," said he, turning toward one of the windows. "This place is damned hot!"

"We'll need all the heat, soon," the Master commented. "At a few thousand feet, the engine-exhaust through those radiators won't be any too much. Forward!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE EAGLE OF THE SKY

He slid open another door. The three men passed through the captain's cabin and pilot-house. This place measured twelve feet on its longer axis and nine on its shorter, being of approximately diamond shape with one point forward in the very nose of the machine, one ending in a door that gave access to the main, longitudinal corridor, and the right and left points joining the walls of the backward-sloping prow. It contained two sofa-lockers with gas-inflated, leather cushions, a chart-rack, pilot's seat, controls, and instrument-board.

The whole front was a magnificent stretch of double plate-glass, with warm air between the sheets to keep snow, frost, or dew from obscuring the vision. Bright light flooded it.

Though one window had been slid partly open—the window on the sill of which the sleeping aviator had lain—a scent of cigarette-smoke still permeated the place. The Master sniffed with disgust. Then suddenly, to the great astonishment of Bohannan, he commanded:

"Bring me that champagne, in the saloon. All of it!"

The major opened wide eyes, but unquestioningly obeyed. Could it be possible the Master, in this moment of exultation, was about to break his lifelong rule and drink a toast, in sparkling bubbles, to success thus far achieved, to the stupendous voyage now about to begin?

Wondering, Bohannan departed. The Master gestured for Captain Alden to seat himself on one of the lockers. Alden kept complete silence as he sat down, crossed one leg over the other and began to study the complex apparatus before him. Most of it was familiar; but some new factors needed inspection.

The Master peered curiously at him. Surely, this man was odd, unusual. Most aviators, thus confronted by strange problems, would have grown loquacious, tried to exhibit their knowledge, asked questions, made much talk. But Alden held his tongue.

A look of appreciation, of liking, came upon the Master's face. It was just the suspicion of a look, for in all this strange man's life no great show of emotion ever had been permitted to mirror itself upon his countenance. But still, the look was there. He half opened his lips, as if to speak, then closed them again, and—like Alden—fell to studying the control apparatus.

All was beautifully arranged, all nicely calculated for instant use. Not here, as in small machines, could the pilot handle his own engines, tilt his planes, or manipulate his rudders by hand. That would have been as absurd to think of, as for the steersman of an ocean liner to work without the intervention of steam steering-gear.

No, these controls actuated various motors that, using current from the dynamos, produced the desired action with smooth and certain promptness. A turn of the wrist, perhaps no more than the touch of a finger, and the whole vast creation would respond as easily as a child's toy can be manipulated by a strong man's hand.

Hooded dials, brightly lighted push-buttons, a telephone headpiece and receiver combined, and switches all lay in easy reach. Here was the tachometer, that would give to a fraction the revolutions of each screw per minute; here the altimeter, to indicate height; here the air-speed indicator, the compass with reflector, the inclinometer, the motometers—to show the heat in each engine—and there, the switch to throw on the gigantic searchlight, with the little electric wheel to control its direction, as accurately as you would point a wand.

Throttle and spark, of course, there were none. All engine control was by telephone, with the engine-room which lay a little aft of midships. But the controls of the vacuum apparatus were within easy reach, so that at will the pilot could exhaust the floats, or fill them.

Here were the starting, stopping, and speed controls of the helicopters, which were under direct electrical motivation by the pilot. Here also were the magnetic-anchor release and the air-skid pump control; here were telephonic connections with the wireless-room and with the fore-and-aft observation pits, where observers were already lying on their cushions upon the heavy, metal-reinforced glass floor-plates.

"This is really very complete," approved the Master. Not Alden, but he, had been first to speak. The Master spoke half against his own wish, but a resistless impulse to make some comment, in this moment of triumph, possessed him.

"Only as expected, sir," replied Alden. The Master bit his lip a second, and said no more.

Bohannan's return with several champagne bottles in his arms, put an end to any possible developments the terse conversation might have had.

"Well, sir," said the major, "here it all is. And I've got glasses in my pocket—and a corkscrew, sir. It never does to forget the corkscrew! We'll drink to happy days, eh, sir?"

Already the Celt's mouth was watering for draughts of the precious liquid. Joy pervaded him that, for once at least, the iron rule of the Master was to be broken, and that the journey was to begin with proper libations. The Master's curt syllables, however, instantly dispelled any illusions he might have entertained on that score.

"Drop them all out that open window, there," commanded the Master.

"What, sir? Good Pommery? Veuve?"

"No argument, Bohannan! Out they go!"

Dismayed, the Celt did the other's bidding, while Alden smiled grimly.
Far below, glass crashed and jangled.

"What's the idea?" demanded the major ruefully.

"You know very well, Major, my ruling on alcohol. It doesn't mix with any motive power on this trip. Moreover, it's customary to christen every launching with champagne. We've done it!"

"Well, that's not so bad an idea, at that," Bohannan admitted, scratching his fiery head. "What name have you given this bus?"

"Nissr Arrib ela Sema."

"Come again, sir?"

"Eagle of the Sky, in Arabic. I suppose we'll have to cut that down to Nissr, for everyday use. But at any rate, our craft is christened. Well, now—"

He settled himself in the pilot's seat, reached forward and drew toward him a shining metal shaft. Four stout spokes unfolded; and from these, quadrants of a rim that easily snapped together. The Master laid one hand easily on the rim of the big steering-wheel, flung his cap upon a locker, pulled down the telephone headpiece and snapped it on.

He touched a button. The light died in the pilot-house, leaving only the hooded glows of the dials, switches, and small levers. Night seemed suddenly to close in about the vast machine. Till now it had been forgotten, ignored. But as darkness fingered at the panes, something of the vastness of sky and air made itself realized; something of the illimitable scope of this adventuring.

Bohannan slid the window shut and settled himself beside Captain Alden. He glanced at his wrist-watch, and a thrill of nervous exultation stabbed him.

"Only two minutes and six seconds more!" he murmured, gnawing at his mustache and blinking with excitement. Alden remained calm, impassive as the Master himself, who now, pressing another button, sent a beam of wonderful, white light lancing through the darkness.

Track, buildings, trees all leaped into vivid relief as he tested the searchlight control. He shot the beam up, up, till it lost itself, vaguely, in mist and cloud; then flung it even across the river, where it picked out buildings with startling detail.

He turned it, finally, square down the launching-way, through the yawning gates where the track abruptly ended at the brow of the Palisades—the empty chasm where, if all went right and no mistake had been made in build, engine-power, or control, the initial leap of Nissr Arrib ela Sema was to be made.

Came a moment's wait. Faintly the pulsing of the engines trembled the fabric of Nissr. Finely balanced as they were, they still communicated some slight vibration to the ship. The Master snicked the switch of the magnetic-anchor release; and now the last bond that held Nissr to her cradle was broken. As soon as the air-skid currents should be set going, she would be ready for her flight.

This moment was not long in coming. Another turn of a switch, and all at once, far below, a faint, continuous hissing made itself audible. Compressed air, forced through thousands of holes at the bottom of the floats, was interposing a gaseous cushion between those floats and the track, just as it could do between them and the earth wherever Nissr should alight.

Suspended thus on a thin layer of air, perhaps no more than a sixteenth of an inch thick but infinitely less friction-producing than the finest ball-bearing wheels and quite incapable of being broken, the ship now waited only the application of the power in her vast propellers.

"Let in numbers two and four," commanded the Master, suddenly, into the engine-room telephone. "In five seconds after we start, hook up one and three; and five later, the other two."

"Aye, aye, sir," came back the voice of Auchincloss, chief engineer.
"Ready, sir!"

Almost at once, the vibration of the engines altered, grew more marked, seemed to be taking hold of something with strong but easy effort. Another trembling made itself felt, as two of the giant screws, connected by reducing-gears with the engine-shafting—all three engines being geared to one shaft, but any one being capable of separate running—began to revolve.

From astern, a dull, droning hum mounted, rose, grew rapidly in volume and power. And, as two more screws began to whirl, the Eagle of the Sky shook herself slightly. She awoke from slumber. Steadily, smoothly on her air-cushions she began to move forward down the long, sloping trackway to the brink of the cliff.

"Lord above!" breathed Bohannan, chewing at his nails. "We're off!"

Neither the Master nor Captain Alden moved, spoke, manifested any excitement whatever. Both might have been graven images of coolness. The Celt, however, got up and leaned at the window-jamb, unable to keep still. He turned suddenly to Alden.

"Come, man!" he exclaimed, half angrily. "Got no heart in you, eh? No interest? Come along out of that, now, and see what's what!"

He laid hold on the captain, and drew him to the window as the airship accelerated her plunge along the rails. The hum of the propellers had now risen to a kind of throaty roar; the craft was shaking with strange quivers that no doubt would cease if she but once could launch herself into the air. Under her, in and in, the shining metal rails came running swiftly and more swiftly still, gleaming silver-like under the vivid beam of the searchlight.

Wind began to rise up against the glass of the pilot-house; the wind of Nissr's own making.

Cool as if in his own easy-chair in the observatory, the Master sat there, hand on wheel. Then all at once he reached for the rising-plane control, drew it over, and into the telephone spoke sharply:

"Full speed ahead, now! Give her all she's got!"

A shout, was it? Many shouts, cries, execrations! But where? Over the roar of the propellers, confused sounds won to the men in the pilot-house. And all at once, by the dim aura of diffused light reflected from the huge beam, the major saw dim figures running, off there to the left, among the buildings of the stockade.

"For the Lord's sake!" he cried, amazed, with drooping jaw.
"Men—after us! Look there—look!"

The Master remained utterly impassive, eyes keen on the in-rushing track, now close to its abrupt ending over the vacancy of space. Captain Alden's pupils narrowed, through the mask-holes, but he said nothing. Bohannan gripped the captain's shoulder painfully, then reached for the pistol in his own holster.

"They're on to us!" he vociferated. "Somebody's got wise—they're—"

Little red spurts of fire began to jet, among the buildings; the crackling of shots started popping, like corn-kernels exploding. Dark figures were racing for the Palisade gate—the gate where, if any slightest thing went wrong with track or giant plane, the whole vast fabric might crash down, a tangled mass of wreckage.

Then it was, that for the first time in all his knowledge of the
Master, Bohannan heard the strange man laugh.

Joyously he laughed, and with keen pleasure. His eyes were blazing, as he thrust the rising-plane lever sharply up.

More shouts volleyed. From somewhere back there in the body of the ship, a cry of pain resounded.

Bohannan flung the window-pane to one side, and blazed away like mad at the attackers.

A shatter of broken glass burst into the pilot-house. Alden, catching his breath, quivered. He uttered no outcry, but his right hand went across and clutched his wounded left arm.

"Got you?" cried the major, still pumping lead. He paused, jerked Alden's automatic from its holster and thrust it into the captain's hand, now red.

Alden, a bit pale but quite impassive, opened fire through the jagged hole in the double pane. Accurately the captain fired at dark figures. One fell. Another staggered; but as the machine swept on, they lost sight of it.

Men rose up before the rushing airship. One of the great gates began to swing shut, far at the end of the track. The Master laughed again, with the wind whipping at his hair. "Full speed ahead!" he shouted into the telephone.

The Nissr leaped into a swifter course. Then all at once she skidded clear of the track, slanted upward, breasted the air. Her searchlight blazed. All along her flanks, fire-jets spangled the night. Cries echoed from her, from the great stockade.

The Master gave her all the lift the farthest wrench of the levers would thrust on her. The gate was almost shut now—would she clear it?

Below, track, earth, everything was spinning in and in. Ahead, above, yawned vastnesses. The Master could no longer see the gate. A second of taut thrill—

Crash!

The Nissr quivered, staggered, yawed away. The forward starboard float had struck. A faint yell rose as someone, hurled backward by the shattered débris of the gate, plunged down the cliff.

For half a second, the giant plane reeled over the abyss. Her rush and fury for that half-second threatened to plunge her, a mangled, flaming wreck, hundreds of feet down on the black, waiting rocks below the Palisades.

But engine-power and broad wings, skill of the hand at the levers, and the good fortune that watches over bold men, buoyed her again.

Suddenly she lifted. Up at a dizzy angle she sped.

A thing of life, quivering, sentient, unleashed, the gigantic Eagle of the Sky—now in heroic flight toward the greatest venturing ever conceived by the brain of man—steadied herself, lifted on the wings of darkness, and, freed from her last bonds, leaped quivering and triumphant into the night.

CHAPTER IX

EASTWARD HO!

Not all the stern discipline that had been enforced by the
Master—discipline already like a second nature to this band of
adventurous men—could quite prevent a little confusion on board the
Eagle of the Sky.

As the huge machine crashed, plunged, staggered, then righted herself and soared aloft, shouts echoed down the corridors, shots crackled from the lower gallery and from a few open ports.

At sound of them, and of faint, far cries from the Palisades, with a futile spatter of pistol-and rifle-fire, the Master frowned. This intrusion of disorder lay quite outside his plans. He had hoped for a swift and quiet getaway. Complications had been introduced. Under his breath he muttered something as he manipulated the controls.

The major, laughing a bit wildly, leaned from the shattered window and let drive a few last pot-shots into the dark, at the faint flicker of lights along the crest of the black cliff. In the gloom of the pilot-house, his shoulders bulked huge as he fired. Captain Alden, staggering back, sat down heavily on one of the sofa-lockers.

One or two faint shots still popped, along the cliff, with little pin-pricks of fire in the dark. Then all sounds of opposition vanished. The Nissr, upborne at her wonderful climbing-angle toward the clouds painted by her searchlight—clouds like a rippled, moonlit veil through which peeped faint stars—spiraled above the Hudson and in a vast arc turned her beak into the south.

Disorder died. Silence fell, save for the whistling of the sudden wind of the airship's own motion, and for the steadily mounting drone of the huge propellers.

"Made it all right, by God!" exclaimed Bohannan, excitedly. "No damage, either. If the floats had smashed when they hit the gate, there'd have been a devil of an explosion—vacuum collapsing, you know. Close call, but we made it! Now, if—"

"That will do!" the Master curtly interrupted, with steadfast eyes peering out through the conning windows. Now that the first élan of excitement had spent itself, this strange man had once more resumed his mantle of calm. Upborne on the wings of wondrous power, wings all aquiver with their first stupendous leap into the night-sky, the Master—impassive, watchful, cool—seemed as if seated in his easy-chair at Niss'rosh.

"That will do, Major!" he repeated. "None of your extravagance, sir!
No time now for rodomontade!" He glanced swiftly round, saw Captain
Alden by the dim aura of light reflected from the instrument-board.
Blood reddened the captain's left sleeve.

"Wounded, Captain?"

"Only a scratch!"

"Report to Dr. Lombardo. And have Simonds, in charge of the stores, replace this broken pane."

"Yes, sir!"

Alden saluted with a blood-stained hand, slipped his gun back into its holster and got up. He swayed a little, with the swinging slide of the air-liner and with the weakness that nerve-shock of a wound brings. But coolly enough he slid open the door leading into the main corridor, and passed through, closing the door after him. Where his hand touched the metal, red stains showed. Neither man of the pair now left in the pilot-house made any comments. This was all in the day's work—this and whatever else might befall.

Spiraling vastly, up, up climbed the giant plane. A colder air nipped through the broken window. Cloud-wisps began to blur the glass; the stars began to burn more whitely in a blacker sky.

The Master touched a button at the left side of the steering-post. Below his feet, as they rested in their metal stirrups, an aluminum plate silently slid back. An oblong of dim light blurred up through the heavy plate-glass sheet it had masked.

Glancing down, the Master saw far, far below him a slowly rotating vagueness of waters black and burnished, of faintly twinkling lights. Lights and water drew backward, as the rotary motion gave way to a southern course. The Master slowed the helicopters. A glance at the altimeter showed him 1,965 feet. The compass in its binnacle gave him direction.

"Pit number one!" he sharply exclaimed into the phone connecting therewith.

"Yes, sir!" came back the observer's voice.

"Keep a sharp eye out for Niss'rosh! Remember, two red lights showing there!"

"Yes, sir. I'll report as soon as I pick them up."

The Master, knowing his course thither should be S.E. by S., drew the liner to that exact angle. Under his skilled touch at the wheel, the compass needle steadied to the dot. The searchlight lanced its way ahead, into the vague drift of the smoke arising from New York.

"Sight it, yet?" demanded the Master, presently.

"Yes, sir. Just picked it up. Hold hard, sir!"

Almost at once, the Master also got a glimpse of two tiny pin-pricks of crimson, high in air above the city-mass. Swiftly Nissr drew over the building. Far, very far down in the chasm of emptiness, tiny strings of light—infinitesimal luminous beads on invisible threads—marked Broadway, Fifth Avenue, countless other streets. The two red winks drew almost underneath.

Down plunged the searchlight, picking Niss'rosh out of the gloom. Through the floor-glass, the Master could descry it clearly. He slowed, circled, playing with vacuum-lift, helicopters, engines, as if they had been keys of a familiar instrument. Presently the liner hovered, poised, sank, remained a little over 750 feet above the observatory on the roof-top.

"Cracowicz!" ejaculated the Master, into the phone again, as his deft fingers made another connection. A foreign voice answered: "Yes, sir!" alertly.

"Ready in the lower gallery now, with the winch and tackles!" bade the
Master.

Again came: "Yes, sir!" from the man in charge of the three who already knew perfectly well what was expected of them. As Nissr slowly turned, a trap opened in the bottom of her lower gallery, almost directly between the two forward vacuum-floats, and down sped a little landing nacelle or basket at the end of a fine steel cable.

Swiftly the electric winch dropped the nacelle, containing three men.
It slowed, at their command, through the phone that led up the wire.
With hardly a jar, the basket landed on the roof.

The men jumped out, made fast their tackles to Captain Alden's plane there, leaped in again and signaled: "Hoist away!"

With noiseless speed the winch gathered in the cable. Up swooped the nacelle. As it cleared the roof, Nissr purred forward, slid away, gathered speed over the city where already the alarm had been given.

In four minutes the men had safely landed in the lower gallery once more, and the plane was being hoisted by davits and made fast on the upper platform, known as the take-off, which served as a runway for planes leaving the ship or alighting thereon.

Over the light-spangled city the giant air-liner gathered way. Three or four searchlights had already begun trying to pick her up. Quiverings of radiance reached out for her, felt into the void, whirled like cosmic spokes. The Brooklyn Navy Yard whipped the upper air for her. Down on Sandy Hook, a slim spear of light stabbed questingly through the night. Then all at once the monster light on Governor's Island caught her, dazzling into the Master's eyes.

He only smiled, as he sheered eastward, dropped East River behind and unloosed the Sky-eagle's course above Brooklyn.

"Just a little fireworks, as a send-off, Major," said he, notching the speed ahead, ever ahead, till a whipping gale began to beat in at the broken pane. "They got word of it pretty quick, eh? I suppose they'll send up a few planes after us."

"After us, yes!" exulted the major. "Faith, they'll be after us, all right—a devil of a long way after!"

To this the Master gave no answer, but signaled Auchincloss in the engine-room for full speed. Now a subtle tremor possessed the vast fabric, mistress of the upper spaces and the night. The close-compacted lights beneath commenced to sprinkle out into tenuous dots. The tiny blazing fringe of Coney burned a moment very far below, then slid away, under the glass flooring. Still heading sharply upward, with altimeter needle steadily mounting, with the cold becoming ever greater, the liner flung herself out boldly over the jet plain of ocean.

Right into the eye of heaven she seemed to point, into a vast and profound blackness, that, as the Master snicked off the no-longer needed searchlight, unleashed myriad stars—stars which leaped out of the velvet night. Already man and the works of man lay far behind. If there had been any tentative pursuit, the Legionaries knew nothing of it. Outdistancing pursuit as an eagle distances sparrows, the liner gloried in her swift trajectory.

The Master nodded, well pleased. Bohannan laughed like a boy, and holstered his gun. He moved over to the starboard window, out of the gale. With mocking eyes he watched the futile searchlight at the Hook.

"They've got as much chance of overhauling us as the proverbial celluloid cat has of catching the asbestos rat," said he. "A clean getaway, barring the little damage we've taken—this window, and Alden, and—"

"Better unpack your kit, and settle down," the Master dryly interrupted him. "Take a look around and see that everything's shipshape. Be sure the port and starboard watches are chosen. Everything's been arranged, already, but in dealing with human beings there's bound to be a little confusion. They aren't automata—unfortunately. And, Major!"

"Yes, sir?" answered Bohannan, who despite his familiarity with the Master was now constrained to formality. Resentment sounded in his voice.

"Send Brodeur to relieve me, in about ten minutes."

"Yes, sir," repeated the Celt. For a moment, standing there in the gloom of the pilot-house, he eyed the dim, watchful figure at the wheel. Then he turned, slid the door, and disappeared.

As he walked aft, past the aluminum ladder that led to the upper galleries, he muttered with dudgeon:

"He rates us two for a nickel, that's plain enough—plain as paint!
Well, all right. I'll stand for it; but there may be others that—"

He left the words unfinished, and went to do the Master's bidding.

Alone, the Master smiled. Wine of victory pulsed in his blood and brain. Power lay under his hand, that closed with joy upon it. Power not only over this hardy Legion, but power in perspective over—

"God, if I can do it!" he whispered, and fell silent. His eyes rested on the instruments before him, their white dials glowing under the little penthouses of their metal shields. Altitude now showed 2,437 feet, and still rising. Tachometers gave from 2,750 to 2,875 r.p.m. for the various propellers. Speed had gone above 190 miles per hour. No sign of man remained, save, very far below through a rift in the pale, moonlit waft of cloud, a tiny light against a coal-black plain of sea—the light of a slow, crawling steamer—a light which almost at once dropped far behind.

Vast empty spaces on all hands, above, below, engulfed Nissr. The Master felt himself alone with air and sky, with power, with throbbing dreams and visions.

"If it can be done!" he repeated. "But—there's no 'if' to it, at all. It can be! It shall! The biggest thing ever attempted in this world! A dream that's never been dreamed, before! And if it can't, well, a dream like that is far more than worth dying for. A dream that can come true—by God, that shall come true!"

His hands tightened on the wheel. You would have said he was trying to infuse some of his own overflowing strength into the mechanism that, whirling, zooning with power, needed no more. The gleam in his eyes, there in the dark pilot-house, seemed almost that of a fanatic. His jaw hardened, his nostrils expanded.

This strange man's face was now wholly other than it had been only a week before, drawn and lined by ennui. Now vast ambitions dominated and infused it with virile force.

As he held the speeding air-liner to her predetermined course through voids of night and mystery, he peered with burning eagerness at the beckoning stars along the world's far, eastern rim.

"Behold now, Allah!" he cried suddenly. "Labbayk![1] I come!"

[Footnote 1: Labbayk (I am here) is the cry of all Mohammedan pilgrims as they approach the holy city of Mecca.]

CHAPTER X

"I AM THE MASTER'S!"

The arrival of Simonds, with the spare window-pane, and of Brodeur—one of the boldest flyers out of Saloniki in the last months of the war—broke in upon the Master's reveries. Only a few minutes were required to mend the window. During this time, the Master explained some unusual features of control to the Frenchman, then let him take charge of Nissr.

"She's wonderful," said he, as Brodeur settled himself at the wheel. "With her almost unlimited power, her impeccable controls and her automatic stabilizers, I hardly see what could happen to her."

"Fire, of course, m'sieur," the ace replied, "always has to be guarded against."

"Hardly on an all-metal liner. Now, here you see—and here—"

He finished his explanations, and, satisfied that all was safe, passed into his own cabin. Rrisa, he found, had already unpacked his kit, and had arranged it to perfection. Even a copper bowl of khat, the "flower of paradise," was awaiting him.

The Master sat down, chewed a few leaves and indulged in a little time of what the Arabs call kayf, or complete relaxation and inner contemplation—a restful trick he had learned many years ago on the coast of Yemen. The ticking of the aluminum-cased chronometer, now marking a little past 2 a.m., soothed him, as did the droning hum of the propellers, the piping whistle of the ship-made hurricane round the fuselage, the cradling swing and rock of the air-liner hurling herself almost due east.

After some quarter-hour of absolute rest, he rang for his Arab orderly. Rrisa appeared at once. Already he had got himself into his military uniform, the one he had worn at Gallipoli when the Master had saved his life. As he stood there in the doorway, he swung his left foot out and back, with clicking heels, and made a smart salute.

"What does M'almé desire?" asked he, in Arabic.

"I desire to know thy opinion of all this, Rrisa. Tell me, did thy great prophet, M'hámed, ever ride in such state through the air? Was Al Burak, his magic horse, on which he traveled to the paradise of the houris, more swift or mighty than this steed of mine?"

The Master speaking Arabic, weighted every word with its full meaning.

"Tell me, Rrisa, what of all this?"

"Your steed is very swift and very mighty. Your flying ship is very great," the Arab admitted. "But Allah and his Prophet are greater! Allahu akbar!" (Allah is greatest!)

"Of course. But tell thou me, Rrisa, if I were to appear at Mecca in my Nissr Arrib ela Sema—my Eagle of the Sky—would not thy people give me great honors?"

"My head is at your feet, M'almé, and I am yours to do with as you will, even to the death, but I implore you, by the beard of the Prophet, do not do this thing!"

"And why not, Rrisa?"

"You and I, Master, are akhawat.[1] Therefore I can speak true words. You must not go to Mecca. No man of the Nasara may go there—and live."

[Footnote 1: Akhawat signifies in Arabic the tie of sworn brotherhood between an Arab and one of different blood.]

"Thou meanest that if we go to Mecca and they capture us, they will kill us all?"

"Yea, Master. And I too shall die, for being with you, though I count that as less than nothing."

The Master kept a moment's silence, pondering; while, without, the voices of empty heaven whistled by, from strut and wire, brace and stay. The wild mystery of that outer night, excluded by the close-drawn curtains, contrasted strongly with the light and the warm comfort of the cabin with its snug berth, its aluminum furniture, its shining walls where were affixed charts and maps, rules, photographs.

Under the clear, white light, Rrisa anxiously studied his master's face. Great anxiety had begun to make itself manifest in the Arab's voice and in his eyes. Another troubled look came, too, as he glanced at the chronometer.

It struck, sharply. The Arab, contrary to all his habits and training, spoke first, without being spoken to.

"Master," said he, timorously, "excuse the speech I offer without waiting. But I must ask. This is my hour of night prayer, and I must bow to Mecca. Whither, from here, lieth The City?"

The Master raised a hand, glanced at a compass set like a wrist-watch, peered a moment at one of the charts, and then nodded toward the door that led into the pilot-house.

Without delay, Rrisa faced that door and prostrated himself. The ancient cry: "La Illaha illa Allah! M'hámed rasul Allah!" was raised there in the cabin of the rushing Eagle of the Sky—surely the strangest place where Moslem prayer was ever offered since first the Prophet's green banner unfurled itself upon the desert air of Araby.

Devoutly Rrisa prayed, then with a "Bismillah!" (In the name of Allah!) arose and faced his master. The latter, wise in Eastern ways, remained gravely unsmiling. Never in all his dealings with the son of the East had he by word or look offended against Islam. There was, however, iron determination in his eyes as he demanded:

"Is it indeed true that in Mecca stands a building called the Ka'aba, also called Bayt Ullah, or Allah's House?"

"Yea, Master, that is true," answered the Arab, with strange eyes.

"And is it indeed covered with a wondrous silken and gold cloth, every year renewed, known as the kiswah?"

"Those words are true."

"All Moslems greatly revere the Ka'aba?"

"It is the center of our mighty faith, Master."

"And thou hast seen it with thine own eyes?"

"With my own eyes, Master, for I am a Hadji.[1]" Attentively the Arab was now watching the Master. Slowly he continued: "Prayer, with face to Mecca, alms-giving, the keeping of the fast of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to the Ka'aba, these are our law. Yea, Master, I have myself seen the Ka'aba, and more than once!"

[Footnote 1: Title among the Arabs and Moslems in general for one who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey which every good Moslem considers necessary for salvation.]

A certain trouble had now grown manifest in Rrisa's eyes. His lips moved silently, as if still praying; but no words were audible. The Master pondered a moment more, then demanded:

"Is it true there is a sacred Black Stone in the walls of the Ka'aba, precious to all followers of the Prophet, from Africa to China and to the farthest isles? Revered by all the two hundred and thirty million of your faith?"

"That is true, M'almé. I myself have touched and kissed the Black
Stone."

"Mecca, the Ka'aba, and the Black Stone are forbidden to all heretics?" relentlessly pursued the Master.

"Wallah! Yea, so they are to—all who are not of Islam," Rrisa tried to soften the answer.

"They tell me," persisted the Master, "the Black Stone is in the western wall of the Ka'aba, about seven feet from the pavement."

"That is a lie!" flared Rrisa, with indignation. "It is in the northeast corner, at the very corner, Master. It is between four feet and five from the ground. That, and no other, is the true place, Master, the place of Hajar el Aswad!" (Black Stone.)

"Ah, yes, yes, the books lie," agreed the Master. "And they say, too, that certain of the Feringi have indeed touched and even kissed the Black Stone, and still lived."

Rrisa's face clouded. It burned coppery, with a flush of hot blood under that dark skin. By the clear white light in the cabin, the Master closely observed him. Idly he broke off a leaf of the khat, and nibbled at it.

"Is that the truth?" he inquired, pitilessly.

"I must speak truth to you, Master," confessed the Arab, with bitter shame. "Two of the Feringi—Nasara men like yourself—have indeed touched and kissed it. Two that we know of. Shaytan el Kabir (the Great Satan) may have permitted others to do that, but we know of only two who have done it—and lived."

"Thou meanest one named Burckhardt, and Sir Richard Burton?"

The Arab shuddered at sound of those names, and silently nodded. Then he burst out:

"Those were their names, M'almé! Those two, disguised as Hujjaj, defiled the Black Stone, which was given by Allah to the first Arabs; and they both escaped. But many others who have tried—"

"Have died at the hands of thy people?"

"Bismillah! Yea!" A flash of pride irradiated the dark face of Rrisa. His figure drew itself erect. Beneath the veneer of civilization with which life among the Feringi had overlaid him, the Master sensed the wild, fierce, free soul of the desert man, to whom the death of the unbelieving dog is sweet.

"It is well," nodded the Master. Then, suddenly he stood up, faced the
Arab, and bent on him a sternly penetrant look.

"Rrisa," said he, impressively, his voice slow, grave, sonorous, "only for me thy bones would today be moldering in the trenches at Gallipoli or maybe rotting in a Turkish grave. The life that is in thee belongs to me! That is thy ancient law. Is it not true?"

"It is true, Master. Nahnu malihin." (We have eaten salt together.)

"And the salt is still in thy stomach?[1]"

[Footnote 1: Some Arab tribes hold that the salt binds protection for only twenty-four hours and at the end of that time must be renewed, otherwise it is "not in their stomachs.">[

"Aye, Master. You are still dakhil (protected) to me."

"Thou art mine to do with as I will?"

"I am the Master's!"

"Treason to me, Rrisa, is treason to thy holy laws. Surely, such treason would plunge thy soul far into the depths of Eblis. When thy time cometh to walk across the burning pit, on the bridge as fine and sharp as the edge of a simitar, if it be laden with treachery to one who hath saved thy life and whose salt thou hast eaten, surely it shall not pass over, but shall fall. Far into the deeps of Jehannum it shall fall, where the Prophet says: 'Stones and men shall be the fuel of the everlasting flame!'"

"I am the Master's," repeated Rrisa, with trembling mouth. He raised his hand to forehead, lips, and heart. "My head is at the Master's feet!"

"Forget that not, thou!" cried the Master, dominantly. "Ru'c'h halla!" (Go!)

CHAPTER XI

CAPTAIN ALDEN STANDS REVEALED

Hardly had the trembling Arab salaamed and departed in terror of soul, knowing not what fearful events might be impending, when Bohannan appeared. The smile on the Master's lips, the sternly calculating expression in his eyes, faded into something as near astonishment as this strange man ever felt, when the major exclaimed:

"Well, faith now, what d'you think? The most improbable thing you can imagine!"

"What may that be, Major?"

"It's not what it may be, it's what it is that's astonishing me.
We've got a stowaway aboard us!"

"Stowaway? Impossible!"

"True, nevertheless. Manderson has just now routed him out of the starboard storage-room, near the reserve petrol-tank."

"Hm! Who is he?"

Bohannan shrugged stout shoulders.

"Don't know yet. He's still dopy. Just coming out of the effects of the lethalizing gas."

"Ah, yes, yes, I see. One of the former crew, I suppose. This is quite inexcusable. That a man should have been overlooked and left aboard—it won't do, Major. Kloof was responsible for that room. Kloof will have to suffer. Any other news?"

"Travers, the New Zealander, is wounded."

"Badly?"

"I'm afraid he's hard hit, sir."

"Well, I'll have a look at him and at this stowaway. Where are they, now?"

"In the lazaret, I suppose you call it. Though what a hospital is, aboard an air-liner, blest if I know!"

"Sick-bay, we'll call it. Problems rising already. A stowaway—rather odd, I must say. Still, as a problem, it's not hard to solve. Nothing simpler than dropping a man overboard."

"You—surely, you wouldn't do that!" ejaculated the major, startled.
His rubicund face grew round with amazement.

"That remains to be seen. Come, let's have a look at him!"

Together they went out into the brightly lighted main corridor, near the ladder to the upper gallery, turned to the right and walked aft. A door, just a little abaft the chartroom and, opposite the Master's cabin, gave a glimpse of the as yet unoccupied smoke-room. Astern of this, they passed the dining-saloon with its long table and its swivel-chairs. Beyond several stateroom doors they came to the transverse corridor at the other side of which, directly facing the main corridor, the engine-room door opened.

Entering the engine-room, they found themselves in a brightly lighted compartment fifteen feet wide by twenty-six feet, seven inches long. This compartment contained six Norcross-Brail engines, each capable of developing 1,150 H.P. The engines were in charge of Auchincloss and two assistant engineers, who had all six engines filling the room with a drowsy drone, like ten billion bees humming themselves to sleep in some mysterious hive.

So nicely adjusted was every part, so accurately true was every shaft, bearing, gear, that practically no vibration could be noted. The voice, in ordinary tones, carried perfectly; and yet in that small space nearly 7,000 H.P. were being produced and transmitted to the propellers and to the storage batteries that operated helicopters and compressed-air system, as well as the lighting-plant of the air-liner.

As the two men entered the engine-room, the Master nodded to Auchincloss. He stood a moment gazing at the brightly flecked metal of the engines, the gleaming walls—hollow and filled with noninflammable helium gas of great lifting power—the men on watch over all this splendid mechanism. Then he passed between engines No. 4 and No. 5, toward the aft wall of the compartment.

Four doors opened in the bulkhead, there. Two communicated with storerooms, one opened into the passage that led to the aft observation pit, the fourth gave access to the sick-bay. This door the Master slid back. Followed by the major he passed through.

A small but fully equipped hospital met their eyes. Cots, operating-table, instrument-cases, sterilizers, everything was complete. Immaculate cleanliness reigned. On two of the cots, men were lying.

Beyond, Captain Alden—still fully dressed—was sitting on a white metal chair. The captain's face was still concealed by the celluloid mask, but a profound pallor was visible on the lower portion of his right cheek and along his left jaw. The set of that jaw showed an invincible obstinacy that bespoke rebellion.

Dr. Lombardo, a dark-skinned Florentine, who had been talking with Captain Alden, turned at the Master's entrance into the sick-bay. Already Lombardo had put on a white linen jacket. Though he had not yet had time to change his trousers, he nevertheless presented a semi-professional air as he advanced to meet the newcomers.

"I'm glad you're here, sir," said he to the Master. "There's trouble enough, already."

"Stowaway?" The Master advanced to the nearer cot.

"Yes, sir. Perhaps not voluntarily so. You know how he was found."

"Such oversight is inexcusable!" The Master leaned down and shook the man by the shoulder. "Come, now!" he demanded. "What's your name?" Curiously he looked at the stranger, a man of great strength, with long arms and powerful, prehensile hands that reminded one of an ape's.

"It's no use questioning him, sir," put in Lombardo, while the major peered curiously at Alden and at the other cot where a man was lying with a froth of bright, arterial blood on his lips. Though this man was suffering torment, no groan escaped him. A kind of gray shadow had settled about eyes and mouth—the shadow of the death angel's wings.

"It's no use, sir," repeated the doctor. "He hasn't recovered consciousness enough, yet, to be questioned. When he does, I'll report."

"Do so!" returned the Master, curtly. "I hardly think we need use much ceremony in disposing of him." He turned to the other cot. "Well, sir, how about this man?"

"I'm—all right, sir," weakly coughed the wounded New Zealander. He tried to bring a hand to his forehead, but could hardly lift it from the sheet. The doctor, with compressed lips, slightly shook a negativing head, as the Master raised interrogative brows.

"Serious," Lombardo whispered. "Shot through the right lung. Bullet still there. Severe internal hemorrhage. I may be able to operate, with Daimamoto assisting, but only in case the patient rallies. We really need a nurse, on this expedition. Medically speaking, we're short-handed. However, I'll do my best, sir."

"I know you will," answered the Master. He stood a moment gazing down at the New Zealander, with stern face and tight mouth. This man on the cot had already given much for the expedition, and might give all. Not without blood and suffering—death, perhaps—was the Master's dream to come to its fruition. After a moment, the Master turned away. He faced Captain Alden.

"Your wound not yet dressed?" demanded he.

"No, sir, not yet."

"And why not, pray?"

"He's simply refused all attention, whatever!" put in the doctor.

"I have a reason, sir," Alden proffered.

"No reason can overrule my orders!" the Master exclaimed. "I commanded you to report to Dr. Lombardo for treatment."

"Nevertheless, sir, I refuse—"

"Insubordination will not be condoned, sir!"

"My reason is valid. When you have heard it, you will understand."

"State your reason, sir!"

"I decline—here."

For a long moment the eyes of the Master met those of Captain Alden, that strangely peered out at him through the eyeholes of the pink, celluloid mask. Bohannan and the doctor stood by, curiously observing this conflict of two wills. Silence came, save for the droning purr of the engines, the buffeting gusts of wind along the fuselage, the slight trembling of the gigantic fabric as it hurled itself eastward through the high air of night.

"This is inexcusable," said the Master, crisply. "I give you one last chance. Either permit treatment, or consider yourself under arrest."

"Before you proceed to such lengths," the captain replied, "I ask one favor of you."

"What favor?"

"Two minutes alone with you, sir."

"Come with me!"

The Master turned and left the sick-bay. Alden rose, weakly enough, and followed him. As the door opened and closed again, the engines hummed louder, then sank again to their dull murmur. Bohannan remained with the doctor.

"Well, faith, can you beat that?" exclaimed the major. "There's an Ethiopian in the woodpile, sure enough. Something strange, here, I'm thinking! Something damned strange here!"

"Is there anything here that isn't?" asked Lombardo, with an odd laugh, as he turned back to the cot where lay the dying New Zealander.

Alone in his cabin with Captain Alden, the Master faced the insubordinate member of his crew with an expression of hard implacability. The captain stood there determinedly confronting him. His right hand held to the table for support. His left sleeve was sodden with blood; the left arm, thrust into the breast of his coat, was obviously numbed, paralyzed.

"Well, sir, what have you to say for yourself?" coldly demanded the
Master.

"I repeat that I cannot—and will not—submit myself to any medical attention from any member of this expedition."

"This is dangerous ground you're treading!" the Master exclaimed. His voice had deepened, grown ominous. "You understood perfectly well the conditions of the undertaking—unquestioning obedience to my orders, with life-and-death powers in my hands, to punish insubordination."

"I understand all that, sir," answered the captain. "I understand it now. Nevertheless, I repeat my refusal to obey."

"By Allah! There must be some deep cause here!" ejaculated the Master, his eyes smoldering. "I intend to work my will, but I am a man of reason. You are entitled to a hearing state your objection, sir. Speak up!"

The captain's answer was to raise his right hand and to loosen the cords securing the celluloid mask. As the Master watched, steadying his nerves against the shock of what he felt must be a nameless horror underneath, Alden tore away the mask and threw it upon the table.

"Here is my reason, sir," said he very quietly, "for not permitting
Lombardo, or any other man here, to dress my wound."

"Good God!" exclaimed the Master, shaken clean out of his aplomb. The shock he had expected had come to him, but in far other guise than he had counted on. With clenched fists and widening eyes he peered at Alden.

The face he now suddenly beheld, under the clear white light of the cabin, was not the hideous, mangled wreck of humanity—The Kaiser's Masterpiece—he had expected to see.

No—far, and very far from that!

It was the face of a woman. One of the most beautiful women his eyes ever had rested on.

CHAPTER XII

THE WOMAN OF ADVENTURE

A moment's utter silence followed. The woman, with another gesture, drew off the aviator's cap she had worn; she pulled away the tight-fitting toupee that had been drawn over her head and that had masked her hair under its masculine disguise. With deft fingers she shook out the masses of that hair—fine, dark masses that flowed down over her shoulders in streams of silken glory.

"Now you see me as I am!" said she, her voice low and just a little trembling, but wholly brave. "Now, perhaps, you understand!"

"I—but you—" stammered the Master, for the first time in all his life completely at a loss, dazed, staggered.

"Now you understand why I couldn't—wouldn't—let Dr. Lombardo dress my wound."

"By the power of Allah! What does all this mean?" The Master's voice had grown hoarse, unsteady. "A woman—here—!"

"Yes, a woman! The woman your expedition needs and must have, if death and sickness happen, as happen they will The woman you would never have allowed to come—the woman who determined to come at all hazards, even death itself. The woman who—"

"But, Lord Almighty! Your papers! Your decorations!"

"Quite genuine," she answered, smiling at him with dark eyes, unafraid. Through all his dazed astonishment he saw the wonder of those eyes, the perfect oval of that face, the warm, rich tints of her skin even though overspread with the pallor of suffering.

"Madam," said he, trying to rally, "this is past all words No explanation can make amends for such deception. Still, the secret is yet yours—and mine. Until I decide what to do, it must be respected."

Past her he walked, to the door, and snapped the catch. She, turning, leaned against the table and smiled. He saw the gleam of perfect teeth. A strange figure she made, with loose hair cascading over her coat, with knickers and puttees, with wounded arm slung in the breast of her jacket.

"Thank you for your consideration," she smiled. "It is on a par with my conception of your character."

"Pray spare me your comments," he replied, coldly. He returned to his desk, but did not sit down there. Against it he leaned, crossed his arms, and with somewhat lowered head studied her. "Your explanation, madam?"

"My papers are en règle," said she. "My decorations are genuine. Numbers of women went through the great war as men. I am one of them, that is all. Many were never discovered. Those who were, owed it to wounds that brought them under observation. Had I not been wounded, you would never have known. I could have exercised my skill as a nurse, without the fact of my sex becoming apparent.

"That was what I was hoping for and counting on. I wanted to serve this expedition both as a flyer and as a nurse. Fate willed otherwise. A chance bullet intervened. You know the truth. But I feel confident, already, that my secret is safe with you."

The light on her forehead, still a little ridged and reddened by the pressure of the edge of the mask, showed it broad, high, intelligent. Her eyes were deep and eager with a kind of burning determination. The hand she had rested on the table clenched with the intensity of her appeal:

"Let me stay! Let me serve you all! I ask no more of life than that!"

The Master, knotting together the loose threads of his emotion, came a step nearer.

"Your name, madam!" he demanded.

"I cannot tell you. I am Captain Alfred Alden to you, still. Just that. Nothing more."

"You continue insubordinate? Do you know, madam, that for this I could order you bound hand and foot, have you laid on the trap in the lower gallery, and command the trap to be sprung?"

His face grew hard, deep-lined, almost savage as he confronted her—the only being who now dared stand against his will. She smiled oddly, as she answered:

"I know all that, perfectly well. And I know the open Atlantic lies a mile or two below us, in the empty night. Nevertheless, you shall not learn my name. All I shall tell you is this—that I am really an aviator. 'Aviatrix' I despise. I served as 'Captain Alden' for eight months on the Italian front and twenty-one months on the Western. I am an ace. And—"

"Never mind about all that!" the Master interrupted, raising his hand. "You are a woman! You are here under false colors. You gained admission to this Legion by means of false statements—"

"Ah, no, pardon me! Did I ever claim to be a man?"

"The impression you gave was false, and was calculated to be so. This is mere quibbling. A lie can be acted more effectively than spoken. All things considered, your life—"

"Is forfeited, of course. I understand that perfectly well. And that means two things, as direct corollaries. First, that you lose a trained flyer and a woman with Red Cross training; a woman you may sorely need before this expedition is done. Second, you deny a human being who is just as eager as you are for life and the spice of adventure, just as hungry for excitement as you or any man here—you deny me all this, everything, just because a stupid accident of birth made me a woman!"

Her clenched right fist passionately struck the table at her side.

"A man's world! That's what this world is called; that's what it is!
And you—of all men—are living down to that idea! You—the Master!"

The man's face changed color. It grew a little pale, with deepening lines. He passed a hand over his forehead, a hand that for the first time trembled with indecision. His strong teeth gnawed at his lower lip. Never before had he lacked words, but now he found none.

The woman exclaimed, her voice incisive, eager, her eyes burning:

"It is because you are a master of men, and of yourself, that I have taken this chance! It is because I have heard of your absolute sense of justice and fair play, your appreciation of unswerving loyalty and of the heart that dares! Now you understand. I have only one more thing to say."

"And what is that?"

"If you respect my secret and let me go with you on this great enterprise, no man aboard the Eagle of the Sky will serve you any more loyally than I. No man will venture more, endure more, suffer more—if suffering has to be. I give you my word of honor on that, as a fighter and—a woman!"

"Your word of honor as—"

"A woman! Do you understand?"

Silence again. Their eyes met. The Master's were first to lower.

"Your life is spared," he answered. "That is a concession to your sex, madam. Had you been a man, I would inevitably have put you to death. As it is, you shall live. And you shall remain with us—"

"Thank God for that!"

"Till we reach land. There you must leave Nissr."

"I shall not leave it alive," the woman declared, her eyes showing dilated pupils of resentment, of anger. "I haven't come this far to be thrown aside like a bit of worthless gear!"

"You and your machine will be cast off, over the first land we touch," the Master repeated doggedly. "Whatever information you may give, cannot injure us, and—"

"Stop! Not another word like that, to me!"

Her eyes were blazing now; her right fist quivered in air.

"You accuse me of treason," she cried. "Oh, what injustice, what—"

"I accuse you of nothing, save of having deceived us all, and of being very much déplacée here. The deception shall continue, as far as the others are concerned. You came to us, as a man. You shall go as one. Your secret shall be absolutely respected, by me. But, madam, understand one thing clearly."

"What is that?" she demanded, still trembling with indignation.

"The fact that you are a woman has no weight with me, so far as your persuading me to let you remain of the party may be concerned. Women have never counted in my life. Their wiles, arts, graces, tears, mean nothing to me. Their entreaties seem futile. Their arguments appear like trivial puerilities.

"Other men are sometimes influenced by such. I tell you now, madam, I shall not be. Your entreaties will have no weight. When the time comes for you to leave Nissr, I trust you will go quietly, with no distressing scene."

A certain grimness showed in the woman's face, making it sternly heroic as the face of Medea or Zenobia. She answered:

"Do you think me the type that entreats, that sheds tears, that exercises wiles?"

"We won't discuss your personality, madam! This interview is drawing to an end. Until we reach land, nothing can be done. Nothing, but to look out for your injury. Common humanity demands that your wound be dressed. Is it a serious hurt?"

"Not compared with the hurt you are inflicting, in banishing me from the Flying Legion!"

"Come, madam, refrain from extravagant speeches! What is your wound?"

"A clean shot through the left arm, I think, a little below the shoulder."

"I realize, of course, that to have Dr. Lombardo dress it would reveal your sex. Could you in any way manage the dressing, yourself?"

"If given antiseptics and bandages, yes."

"They shall be furnished, also a stateroom."

"That will excite comment."

"It may," the Master answered, "but there is no other way. I will manage everything privately, myself. Then I will let it transpire that there was some injury to the face, as well, and that the mask had to be removed. I can let the impression get about that you refused to allow anyone but me see your mutilated face.

"I can also hint that I have helped you with the dressing, and have ordered you to keep your stateroom for a while. When it comes time to leave Nissr, I will dispatch you as a messenger. Thus your secret will remain intact. Besides, no one will dare inquire into anything. No one ventures to discuss or question any decision of mine."

Something of hard arrogance sounded in the Master's voice. The woman thanked him, her eyes penetrant, keenly intelligent, even a trifle mocking. One would have said she was weighing this strange man in the balance of judgment, was finding him of sterling stuff, yet was perhaps cherishing a hope, not untinged with malice, that some day a turn of fate might humble him. The Master seemed to sense a little of this, and took a milder tone.

"I must compliment you on one thing, madam," said he, with just the wraith of a smile. "Your acting has been perfection itself. And the fortitude with which you have borne the discomfort of that mask for more than a week, to achieve your ends, cannot be too highly praised."

"Thank you," she replied. "I would have stood that a year, to be one of your Legion! But now—tell me! Isn't there any possibility of your reversing your decision?"

"None, madam."

"Isn't there anything I can say or do to—"

"Remember, you told me just a minute ago you were not the type of woman who entreats!"

CHAPTER XIII

THE ENMESHING OF THE MASTER

She fell silent, biting her full lip. Something in her eyes shamed the man. Not for all his inflexible sternness could he feel that he had come out a winner in this, their first encounter. A woman—one of the despised, ignored creatures—had deceived him. She had disobeyed his orders. She had flatly thrown down the gage of battle to him, that she would never leave Nissr alive. And last, she had forced him into planning to disseminate falsehoods among his crew—falsehoods the secret of which only she shared with him.

Unwilling as this man was to have anything in common with her, he had been obliged to have something in common—to have much. Something existed; a bond, even if an unpleasant one, had already stretched itself between these two—the first secret this man ever had shared with any woman.

"Captain Alden" smiled a little. The honors of war, so far, lay all in her camp.

The Master, feeling this to the inner marrows, humiliated, shaken, yet through it all not quite able to suppress a kind of grudging and unwilling tribute of admiration, sought to conceal his perturbation with a stern command:

"Now, madam, I will call my orderly and have you escorted to a stateroom; have you provided with everything needful for your injury. I trust it is not causing you any severe pain?"

"Pray don't waste any time or thought on any injury of mine, sir!" the woman returned.

"Very well, madam! Resume your disguise!"

She tried to sweep up her magnificent hair and secure it upon her head. But with only one hand available this proved impossible. They both saw there was no way for her to put on the toupee again.

She smiled oddly, with a half-whimsical, wholly feminine bit of malice. Her eyes seemed dancing.

"I'm afraid I can't obey you, sir," she proffered. "You can see for yourself, it can't be done."

A dull, angry flush crept over the Master's rather pale face, and lost itself in the roots of his thick, black hair. Perfectly well he saw that he was being cornered in an untenable position of half-command, half-intimacy. Without apparently exercising any wiles, this woman was none the less involving him in bonds like those the Lilliputians threw round sleeping Gulliver.

Anger welled up in his proud heart that anyone—much less a woman—should thus lower his dignity. But still his manhood dictated courtesy. He came a few steps nearer, and said:

"I must admit this seems rather an embarrassing situation. Frankly, it does not tend to ameliorate the relation between us. You have placed yourself—and me—in a peculiarly compromising position. I must try to meet it.

"Obviously you cannot expect one so unskilled as I, in things feminine, to help you in the capacity of lady's maid Therefore only one thing remains to do. Instead of calling my orderly, and having him show you your stateroom, I must in some way arrange to get you there, myself."

"That's kind of you, I'm sure," she answered, half in mockery, half in gratitude.

"There I will supply you with medical supplies. In some manner or other you can manage to do up your hair and resume your disguise. You will remain in your stateroom—under arrest—until such time as you are cast loose, tomorrow, in your plane."

"Tomorrow?"

"I should say, sometime before night of the day that has already begun. Food and drink will be brought you, of course."

"That's very good of you, sir." Her smile tantalized. The curt laconicism of her manner, in the masculine role, had changed to the softer ways of womankind. Despite himself, the Master was constrained to admire her ability as an actress.

"Of course you realize," she continued, "that to cast me loose in a plane, with only one serviceable arm, will be equivalent to committing cold-blooded murder."

"A mere detail!"

"A mere detail—to murder a woman?"

"Pardon me, you misunderstand. I mean, the manner in which you are to leave Nissr matters little, so long as you leave. I will see that you are safely landed—that no harm arrives to you.

"But you—shall not remain with us. Now, kindly stay here. Lock the cabin door after I have gone, and admit no one until I return. I will signal you with two triple knocks, thus."

He illustrated the knocks, on the table, and, unlocking the door, left the cabin in a black humor. The sound of the woman locking the door after him, the knowledge that he had been obliged to make up a little code for readmission, angered him as he rarely had been angered.

Self-protection, however, demanded these subterfuges. To let the secret escape, and to be obliged to admit having been deceived by a woman, would fatally lower his prestige with the Legionaries. How could he, if known to be the dupe of a woman, command those hard, bold men?

Humiliated, yet in his heart thankful that no one had yet penetrated the secret—as Dr. Lombardo easily might have done, had he laid forcible hands on "Captain Alden"—the Master set about the necessary task of himself preparing a stateroom and providing the requisite medical supplies.

Lombardo asked no questions. His eyes, however, had grown quizzical. No one else seemed to notice what the Master was about. Each was busy in his own place, at his own task.

Twenty minutes had passed before all was ready and the Master could return to his cabin. He rapped as agreed, and was admitted, feeling his cheeks burn at even the analogy between this clandestine entrance and some vulgar liaison—a thing he scrupulously had avoided all his life.

"Come!" he directed. She followed him. Silently he ushered her into her appointed place. No one had seen them. He followed her into the little stateroom, closed the door, folded his arms and confronted her with a grim face.

"Before leaving you, madam," said he, "I wish to repeat that only your sex has saved you from summary execution. You are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, in the code of this expedition—guilty of falsehood and deception that might have introduced fatal complications into my most carefully evolved plan.

"Nevertheless, my code as an officer prohibits any punishment other than this merely nominal arrest. I must offer you temporary hospitality. Moreover, if you need any assistance in dressing your wound, I will give it. Common humanity demands that."

"I don't need anything, thank you," she answered. "I don't ask for anything, but to stay with the Legion."

"That's a point I must positively decline to argue, madam," he informed her, shaking his head. "And, since there is nothing more to say, I wish you a very good night!"

Bowing, he left the stateroom. He heard the door-catch snap. Somehow, in some way as yet inexplicable to him, that sound caused him another discomfort. For the first time in his life he had been having private conversation with a woman—conversation that might almost have been construed as intimate, since it had held secrets. For the first time he had felt himself outwitted by a woman, beaten, made mock of. Now he was being shut away from her.

Inwardly raging as he was, hot, confused, unhorsed, still a strange, fingering insinuation of something agreeable had begun to waken in him. The Master, not understanding it at all, or being able to analyze sensations so foreign to all his previous thought and experience, cut the Gordian knot of puzzlement by roundly cursing himself, by Allah and the Prophet's beard, as a fool. And with a vastly disturbed mind he returned along the white, gleaming corridor—that dipped and swayed with the swift rush of Nissr—back to his own cabin.

There he found the buzzer of his little desk-telephone intermittently calling him.

"Yes, hello?" he answered, receiver at ear, as he sat down in the swivel-chair of aluminum with its hydrogen cushion.

The voice of the wireless man, Menendez, reached him. In a soft,
Spanish-accented kind of drawl, Menendez said:

"Just picked up two important radios, sir."

"Well? What are they?"

"International Air Board headquarters, in Washington, has been notified of our getaway. They have sent out calls for all air-stations in both America and Europe to put up scout-squadrons to watch for us."

"What else?"

"Two squadrons have been started westward across the Atlantic, already, to capture or destroy us."

"Indeed? Where from?" The Master spoke coldly. This information, far from seeming important to him as it had to Menendez, appeared the veriest commonplace. It was nothing but what he had expected and foreseen. He smiled grimly as he listened to the radio man's answer:

"One squadron has started from Queenstown. The other from the
Azores—from St. Michaels."

"Anything else?"

"Well, sir, now and then I can get a few words they're sending from plane to plane—or from plane to headquarters. They mean business. It's capture or kill. They're rating us as pirates."

"Very well. Anything really important?"

"Nothing else, sir."

"Keep me informed, if any real news comes in. But don't disturb me with trifles!"

The Master hung up the receiver, sat back in his chair and stretched his long, powerful legs under the desk. He set both elbows on the arms of the chair, joined his finger-tips and sank his lips upon them.

"I'd better be rigging that vibratory apparatus before long," he reflected. "But still, there's no immediate hurry. Time enough for all that. Lots of time."

His thoughts wandered from Nissr and the great adventure, from the coming attackers, from the vibratory apparatus, yes from the goal of all this undertaking itself, back to "Captain Alden." The who and why, the whence and whither of this strange woman urgently intruded on his mind; nor by any effort of the will could he exclude these thoughts.

For a long time, while Nissr roared away eastward, ever eastward into the night, he sat there, sunk in a profound revery.

"A woman," he whispered, finally, the words lingering on his lips. "A woman, eh? Strange—very strange!"

Resolutely he forced himself to consider the plans he had laid out; his success thus far; the means he meant to take with the attacking squadrons; the consummation of his whole campaign so vast, so overpowering in its scope.

But through it all, persisted other thoughts. And these, he found, he could not put away.

The buzzer of the desk-telephone again recalled him to himself.
"Hello, hello?"

"I have to report that a third squadron has been ordered into the air, from Monrovia," announced Menendez.

"Very well! Anything else?"

"No, sir."

The Master hung up the receiver, arose, and seemed to shake himself from the kind of torpor into which his thoughts of the woman had plunged him.

"Enough of this nonsense!" growled he. "There's work to be done—work!"

With fresh energy he flung himself into the task of planning how to meet and to repel the three air-fleets now already on the westward wing to capture or annihilate the Flying Legion.

CHAPTER XIV

STORM BIRDS

The first slow light of day, "under the opening eyelids of the morn," found the Master up in the screened observation gallery at the tip of the port aileron. Here were mounted two of the six machine-guns that comprised Nissr's heavier armament; and here, too, were hung a dozen of the wonderful life-preservers—combination anti-gravity turbines and vacuum-belt, each containing a signal-light, a water-distiller and condensed foods—that, invented by Brixton Hewes, soon after the close of the war, had done so much to make air-travel safe.

Major Bohannan was with the Master. Both men, now in uniform, showed little effect of the sleepless night they had passed. Wine of excitement and stern duties to perform, joined with powerful bodies, made sleeplessness and labor trivialities.

For an hour the two had been standing there, wrapped in their long military overcoats, while Nissr had swooped on her appointed ways, with hurtling trajectory that had cleft the dark. Somewhat warmed by piped exhaust-gases though the glass-enclosed gallery had been, still the cold had been marked; for without, in the stupendous gulf of emptiness that had been rushing away beneath and all about them, no doubt the thermometer would have sunk below zero.

Nissr's altitude was now very great, ranging between 17,500 and 21,000 feet, so as to take advantage of the steady eastward setting wind in the higher air-lanes. A hard, frozen moonlight, from the steely disk sinking down the western sky, had slashed ink-black shadows of struts and stanchions across the gallery, and had flung Nissr's larger shadow down the hungering abysses of the sky that yawned beneath.

That shadow had danced and quivered at fantastic speed across dazzling moonlit fields of cloud, ever keeping pace with the Sky Eagle, now leaping across immense and silent drifts of white, now plunging, vanishing into black abysses that showed the ocean spinning backward, ever backward toward the west.

With the coming of dawn, the shadow had faded, and the watchers' eyes had been turned ahead for some first sight of the out-riders of the attacking fleets. Bohannan, a little nervous in spite of his well-seasoned fighting-blood, had smoked a couple of cigars in the sheltered gallery, pacing up and down with coat-collar about his ears and with hands thrust deep in pockets. The Master, likewise muffled, had refused all proffers of tobacco and had contented himself with a few khat leaves.

Silence had, for the most part, reigned between them. Up here in the gallery, conversation was not easy. The hurricane of Nissr's flight shrieked at times with shrill stridor and with whistlings as of a million witches bound for some infernal Sabbath on the Matterhorn. A good deal of vibration and of shuddering whipped the wing-tip, too; all was different, here, from the calm warmth, comfort, and security of the fuselage.

The men seemed standing on the very pinion-feathers of some fabled roc, sweeping through space. Above, below, complete and overwhelming vacancy clutched for them. The human is not yet born who can stand thus upon the tip of such a plane, and feel himself wholly at ease.

As darkness faded, however, and as approaching dawn began to burn its slow way up the stupendous vaults of space above the eastern cloud-battlements—battlements flicked with dull crimson, blood-tinged blotches, golden streaks and a whole phantasmagoria of shifting hues—something of the oppression of night fell from the two men.

"Well, we're still carrying on. Things are still going pretty much O.K., sir," proffered the major, squinting into the East—the cold, red East, infinitely vast, empty, ripe with possibilities. "A good start! Close to a thousand miles we've made; engines running to a hair; men all fitting into the jobs like clockwork. Everything all right to a dot, eh?"

The Master nodded silently, keeping dark eyes fixed on the horizon of cloud-rack. Above, the last faint prickings of stars were fading. The moon had paled to a ghostly circle. Shuddering, Nissr fled, with vapory horizons seemingly on her own level so that she appeared at the bottom of an infinite bowl. Bohannan, feeling need of speech, tried to be casual as he added:

"I don't feel sleepy. Do you? Seems like I'd never want to sleep again. Faith, this is living! You've got us all enthused. And your idea of putting every man-jack in uniform was bully! Nothing like uniforms—even a jumble of different kinds, like ours—to cement men together and give them the esprit de corps. If we go through as we've begun—"

The Master interrupted him with a cold glance of annoyance. The Celt's exuberance jarred on his soul. Since the affair with "Captain Alden," the Master's nerves had gone a little raw.

Bohannan rallied bravely.

"Of course," he went on, "it was unfortunate about that New Zealand chap going West. He looked like a right good fellow. But, well—c'est la guerre! And I know he wouldn't have chosen a finer grave than the bottom of the Atlantic, where he's sleeping now.

"By the way, how did Alden come out? Much hurt, was he? I know, of course, he didn't go back to the sick-bay. So he couldn't have been badly wounded, or he would be—"

"The Arabs have a saying, my dear fellow," dryly answered the Master, "that one ear is worth ten thousand tongues. Ponder it well!"

The major's look of astonishment annoyed the Master, even while it hurt him. He took scant pleasure in rebuffing this old friend; but certainly "Captain Alden" would not bear discussing. Feeling himself in a kind of impasse regarding Alden, and fearing some telltale expression in his eyes, the Master swung up his binoculars and once more swept the cloud-horizons from northeast to southeast.

"We ought to be sighting some of the attackers, before long," judged he. "I'm rather curious to see them—to see flies attacking an eagle. I haven't had a real chance of testing out the neutralizers. Their operation, in actual practice, ought to be interesting."

He tried to speak coldly, impersonally; but he well realized a certain strained quality in his voice. Even now, in the hour of impending attack, his thoughts could not remain wholly fixed on the enemy which—so the wireless informed him—lay only a little beyond the haze-enshrouded, burning rim of cloudland.

Despite every effort of the will, he kept mentally reverting to the midships port stateroom containing the woman. He could not keep himself from wondering how she was getting on. Her wound, he hoped—he felt confident—could not be serious.

Had it been, of course, the woman would have asked some further aid.
And since the moment when he had left her, no word had come to him.
More than once, temptation had whispered: "Go to her! She has deceived
you, and you are master here. But, above all, you are a man!"

Twice he had all but yielded to this inner voice. But he had not yielded. Another and a sterner voice had said: "She is an interloper. She has no rights. Why give her another thought?"

This voice had prevailed. The Master had told himself only a few hours more remained, at all events, before the woman should be cast off and abandoned in whatever strange land might befall—probably Morocco, or it might be the Spanish colony of Rio de Oro on the western fringes of the Sahara. After that, what responsibility for her safety or her welfare would be his? Why, he had none, even now!

"But, man," the small voice insinuated, "she came to you on an errand of mercy, to nurse and care for such as might fall ill or be wounded. It was not wholly the desire for adventure that led her to deceive you. Her motive was high and fine!"

"A curse on all women!" retorted the other voice. "Away with her!" And this sterner voice again prevailed. Still, at thought that sometime during the day now close at hand he was to see the last of this woman who had stood there before him in his cabin, with dark eyes looking into his, with eager, oval face upturned to his, with all that glory of lustrous hair a flood about her shoulders, something unknown, unwonted, fingered at the latchets of his heart.

He realized that he felt strange, uneasy, uprooted from his sober aplomb. Unknown irritations possessed him. Under his breath he muttered an Arabic cynicism about woman, from the fourth chapter of the Koran: "Men shall have the preeminence above women, because Allah hath caused the one of them to excel the other!"

Then came the philosophical reflection:

"Man, you were seeking new sensations, new experiences, to stir your pulses. This woman has given you many. She has served her purpose. Now let her go!"

Thus, seeming to have reached a certain finality of decision, he dismissed her again from his mind—for perhaps the twentieth time—and with new care once more began studying the gold-edged, shining clouds where now a dull, broad arc of molten metal had burned its way out of the mists.

The Master slid colored ray-filters over his binoculars, to shield his eyes from the direct dazzle of the rising sun, and swept that incandescent arc. Suddenly he drew a sharp intake of breath.

"Sighted something, eh?" demanded the major, already recovered from the snub administered.

"See for yourself, Major, what you make of it! Right in the sun's eye, and off to southward—all along that fantastic, crimson cloud-castle."

Bohannan's gaze narrowed through his own glasses. Bracing his powerful legs against the quivering jar of the aileron, he brushed the horizon into his eager vision. The glasses steadied. There, of a truth, black midges had appeared, coming up over the world's rim like a startled covey of quail.

CHAPTER XV

THE BATTLE OF VIBRATIONS

Two, five, a dozen, now a score of tiny specks dotted the mist, some moving right across the broadening face of the sun itself. As Nissr's flight stormed eastward, and these gnats drove to the west, their total rate of approach must have been tremendous; for even as the men watched, they seemed to find the attackers growing in bulk. And now more and ever more appeared, transpiring from the bleeding vapors of dawn.

"Looks like business, sir!" exclaimed the Celt, his jaw hard.

"Business, yes."

"Bad business for us, eh?"

"It might be, if we had only the usual means of defense. Under ordinary circumstances, our only game would be to turn tail and run for it, or cut away far to the south—or else break out a white flag and surrender. But—"

"That must be the Azores air-fleet," judged Bohannan. "The others couldn't have made so much westing, in this time. Faith, what a buzzing swarm of mosquitoes! I had no idea there were that many planes on the Azores International Air Board station!"

"There are many things you have no idea of, Major," replied the Master, sharply. "That, however, is immaterial. Yes, here come the fringes of attack, all right enough. I estimate forty or fifty in sight, already; and there must be a few hundred back of those, between here and land, north and south. Technically, we're pirates, you know."

"Pirates?" demanded the major, lowering his glass.

The Master nodded.

"Yes," he answered. "That's what the wireless tells us. We'll get short shrift if—my apparatus fails."

"How do they make us out pirates?" Bohannan ejaculated. It was not fear that looked from his blue eyes, but a vast astonishment. His ruddy face, amazed under the now strengthening light of day, brought a smile to the Master's lips.

"What else are we, my dear fellow?" the Master queried. "To seize a ship—a water-ship or one of the air matters nothing—and to overpower the crew, kill or wound a few, throw them outboard and sail away, comes pretty near constituting piracy. Of course the air-rules and laws aren't wholly settled yet; but we're in a fair way of giving the big-wigs a whacking precedent to govern the future. I fancy a good many cases will be judged as per the outcome of this expedition.

"We're pirates all right—if they catch us. And they will catch us if they get within gunshot. The next few minutes will settle that question of whether they're going to, or not!"

"Nice, comforting prospect!" muttered the Celt. "What do they do with pirates, anyhow, these days? They can't hang us at the yard-arm, because airships don't have 'em. Of course they might stage a hanging-bee with this Legion dangling from the wings, but that would be pretty hard to manage. It'll be shooting, eh?"

"Probably, if my neutralizer fails."

"You're cheerful about it! The neutralizer may be all right, in its way, but personally I'm rather strong for these!" He laid a hand on the breech of the Lewis machine-gun mounted in the gallery, its grim muzzle pointed out through a slit in the colloid screen. "The six guns we've got aboard, in strategic positions, look like good medicine to me! Wouldn't it be the correct thing to call the gun-crews and limber up a little? These chaps aren't going to be all day in getting here, and when they do—"

"I admire your spirit, Major," interrupted the other, with undertones of mockery, "but it's of the quality that, after all, can't accomplish anything. It's the kind that goes against artillery with rifles. Six guns against perhaps six hundred—and we're not built for rapid maneuvering. That swarm could sting us a thousand times while we were giving them the first round. No, no, there's nothing for it now, but the neutralizer!"

"My will is made, anyhow," growled Bohannan. "Faith, I'm glad it is!"

The Master gave no reply, but took from the rail the little phone that hung there, and pressed a button, four times. He cupped the receiver at his ear.

"You, Enemark?" asked he, of the man at the neutralizer far down in the penetralia of the giant air-liner. "Throw in the first control. Half-voltage, for three minutes. Then three-quarters, for two; and then full, with all controls. Understand?"

"Yes, sir!" came the crisp voice of Enemark. "Perfectly!"

The Master hung up the receiver, and for a moment stood brooding. An intruding thought had once more forced itself into his brain—a thought of "Captain Alden." In case of capture or destruction, what of the woman? Something very like a pang of human emotion pierced his heart. Impatiently he thrust the thought aside, and turned with a quiet smile to Bohannan.

The major, red with excitement and impatience, still had a hand on the machine-gun. He was patting it slightly, his face eloquent of longing and regret.

"Still pinning your faith to steel-jacketed streams of bullets, are you, as against ion-jacketed streams of vibrations?" the Master rallied him. "We shall see, immediately, whether you're right or I am! Bullets are all well enough in their place, Major, but electrons are sometimes necessary. Vibrations, Major—I pin my faith to vibrations."

"Vibrate all you want to!" exclaimed the Celt, irefully, his eyes on the thickening swarm of flyers, some of them now plainly visible in detail against the aching smears of color flung across the eastern reaches of cloudland. "Vibrate away; but give me this!" He fondled the gleaming gun as if it had been a pet. "I tell you frankly, if I were in charge here, I'd let the vibrations go to Hell and begin pumping lead. I'd have all gun-crews at stations, and the second we got in range I'd open with all six Lewises!"

"Yes, and Nissr would go crumpling down, a minute later, a blazing sieve fore-and-aft—wings, tanks, fuselage, everything riddled with thousands of bullets. Vibration is the trick, I tell you. It's everything.

"All life is vibration. When it ceases, that is death—and even dead matter vibrates. All our senses depend on vibration. Everything we feel, see, hear, taste, comes to our knowledge through vibrations. And the receptive force in us is vibration, too. The brain is just one great, central ganglion for the taking in of vibrations.

"The secret of life, of the universe itself, is vibration. If we understood all about that, the cosmos would have no secrets from us. So now—ah, see there, will you? See, Major, and be convinced!"

He pointed eastward, into the blazing sunrise. The out-fling of his arm betrayed more human emotion than he had yet shown. Exultation leaped to his usually impassive eyes. Surely, had not this expedition—which he had hoped would give surcease from ennui and stir the pulses—had it not already yielded dividends? Had it not already very richly repaid him?

"See there, now!" he cried again, and gripped the rail with nervous hands.

"Lord above!" ejaculated the major, squinting through his binoculars.

"Astonished, eh?" demanded the Master, smiling with malice. "Didn't think it would work, did you? Well, which do you choose now, Major—bullets or vibrations?"

"This—this is extraordinary!" exclaimed Bohannan. His glasses traveled to and fro, sweeping the fringelike fan of the attackers, still five or six miles away. "Faith, but this is—"

The binoculars lowered slowly, as Bohannan watched a falling plane. Everywhere ahead there in the brazier of the dawn, as the two men stood watching from the wind-lashed gallery of the on-roaring liner, attackers were dropping. All along the line they had begun to fall, like ripe fruit in a hurricane.

Not in bursts of flame did they go plunging down the depths, gyrating like mad comets with long smoke-trailers and redly licking manes of fire. Not in shattered fragments did they burst and plumb the abyss. No; quite intact, unharmed, but utterly powerless they fell.

Some spiraled down, like dead leaves twirling in autumnal breezes, with drunken yaws and pitches. Others in long slants volplaned toward the hidden sea, miles below the cloud-plain. A few pitched over and over, or slid away in nose-dives and tail-spins. But one and all, as they crossed what seemed an invisible line drawn out there ahead of the onrushing Eagle of the Sky, bowed to some mysterious force.

It seemed almost as if Nissr were the center of a vast sphere that moved with her—a sphere through which no enemy could pass—a sphere against the intangible surface of which even the most powerful engines of the air dashed themselves in vain.

And still, as others and still others came charging up to the attack like knights in joust, they fell. One by one the white wool cushions of the cloud, gold-broidered by the magic needles of the sun, received them. One by one they faded, vanished, were no more.

So, all disappeared. Between a hundred and a hundred and twenty-five planes were silently, swiftly, resistlessly sent down in no more than twenty minutes, while the watchers stood there in the gallery, fascinated by the wondrous precision and power of this new and far-outflung globe of protection.

And again the blood-red morning sky grew clear of attackers. Again, between high heaven's black vault and the fantastic continent of cloud below, nothing remained but free vacancy. The Master smiled.

"Vibrations, my dear Major!" said he. "Neutralize the currents delivered by the magnetos of hostile planes to their spark-plugs, and you transform the most powerful engines into inert matter. Not all the finely adjusted mechanism in the world, nor the best of petrol, nor yet the most perfect skill is worth that," with a snap of the strong fingers, "when the spark dies.

"My device is the absolute ruler of whatever spark I direct it against. Our own ignition is screened; but all others within the critical radius become impotent. So you recognize, do you not, the uselessness of machine-guns? The groundlessness of any fears about the Air Patrol's forces?"

"Lord, but this is wonderful!" Bohannan ejaculated. "If we'd only had this in the Great War, the Hun would have been wiped out in a month!"

"Yes, but we didn't have it," the Master smiled. "I've just finished perfecting it. Put the last touches on it hardly twenty-four hours ago. If there's ever another war, though—ah, see there, now! Here comes one lone, last attacker!"

He pointed. Far at the edge of empty cloudland, now less blood-stained and becoming a ruddy pink under the risen sun, a solitary aerial jouster had grown visible.

The last attacker appeared a feeble gnat to dance thus alone in the eye of morning. That one plane should, unaided, drive on at Nissr's huge, rushing bulk, seemed as preposterous as a mosquito trying to lance a rhinoceros. The major directed a careful lens at this survivor.

"He has his nerve right in his baggage with him," announced the Celt.
"Sure, he's 'there.' There can be no doubt he's seen the others fall.
Yet—what now? He's turning tail, eh? He's on the run?"

"Not a bit of it! He's driving straight ahead. That was only a dip and turn, for better air. Ah, but he's good, that fellow! There's a man after my own heart, Major. Maybe there's more than one, aboard that plane. But there's one, anyhow, that's a real man!"

The Master pondered a moment, then again picked up the phone.

"Enemark?" he called. "That you?"

"Hello! Yes, sir! What orders, sir?"

"Cut off the ray! Quick, there!"