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