ything, 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 headqua