cylinders. O.K., now."

Paula's hand touched his shyly. He smiled abstractedly at her and went
back to the controls.

And then the plane kept on steadily. Time and space have become purely
relative in these days, in startling verification of Mr. Einstein, and
the distance between Buenos Aires and Magellan Strait is great or
small, a perilous journey or a mere day's travel, according to the
mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager. Before four
o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward,
and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung
high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more
swiftly than its own engines could have contrived.

* * * * *

It was little before sunset when the character of the shore changed
yet again, and the sun was low behind a bank of angry clouds when the
stubby forefinger of rock that Magellan optimistically named the Cape
of the Eleven Thousand Virgins reached upward from the seemingly
placid water. Bell swept lower, then, much lower, looking for a
landing place. He found it eight or nine miles farther on, on a wide
sandy beach some three miles from a lighthouse. The little plane
splashed down into tumbling sea and, half supported by the waves and
half by the lift remaining to its wings, ran for yards up upon the
hard packed sand.

The landing had been made at late twilight, and Bell moved stiffly
when he rose from the pilot's seat.

"I'm going over to that lighthouse," he said curtly. "There won't be
enough men there to be dangerous and they probably haven't frequent
communication with the town. I'll learn something, anyway. You two
stay with the plane."

Jamison lifted his eyebrows and was about to speak, but looked at
Bell's expression and stopped. Leadership is everywhere a matter of
emotion and brains together, and though Jamison had his share of
brains, he had not Bell's corroding, withering passion of hatred
against The Master and all who served him gladly. All the way down the
coast Bell had been remembering things he had seen of The Master's
doing. His power was solely that of fear, and the deputies of his
selection had necessarily been men who would spread that terror with
an unholy zest. The nature of his hold upon his subjects was such that
no honorable man would ever serve him willingly, and for deputies he
had need of men even of enthusiasm. His deputies, then, w