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 a.n.a.lyze 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, h.e.l.lo?" 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.
"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo?"
"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 pa.s.sed. 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 gla.s.s-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_ alt.i.tude 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 m.u.f.fled, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 p.r.i.c.kings 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.