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The Master detailed Simonds, L'Heureux, and Seres to construct a still, which they did in only a little more than three hours. The apparatus was ingeniously and efficiently built, out of two large provision tins and some piping which they got together with a few tools by swimming out to the air-liner.
The air-liner gathered speed as the west wind got behind her, listed her, pushed her forward in its mighty hands. Swifter, ever swifter, her shadow slipped over dune and wady, over hillock and nullah, off away toward the pellucidly clear-golden tints of the horizon beyond which lay the unknown.
For a few moments he lay there, half dreamily listening to the deep bass hum of the propellers, the slight give and play of the air-liner as she shuddered under the powerful drive of her Norcross-Brail engines. His thoughts first dwelt a little on yesterday's battle and on the wondrous treasure now in his hands.
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.
A sudden, furious hissing burst out beneath her, as the compressed-air valves were thrown and the air-cushions formed beneath her thousands of spiracles. Then, with hardly a shudder, easily as a tired gull slips down into the quiet of a still lagoon, the vast air-liner took earth.
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.
Another joined it, but no dust-spurts leaped from the dune, where now a continual play of fire was leaping out. The Beni Harb, keenly intelligent, sensed either that they were being fired at with blanks, or that the marksmanship aboard the air-liner was execrable.
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.
'Allah knows best and time will show. But whatever it may be is it completion? The human heart, alone can that ever be complete in this world?" He bent at the rail, gazing far out into the vague emptiness through which the air-liner was pushing. "Come what may," he murmured, "for tonight, at any rate, it is peace. 'It is peace, till the rising of the dawn!"
"Ah, nom de Dieu!" cried Leclair, in sudden rage at seeing his chance all gone to pot, of coming to grips with the hated Beni Harb. From the penetralia of the air-liner, confused shouts burst forth. The upper galleries grew vocal with execrations. Not one was of fear; all voiced disappointment, the passion of baffled fury. Angrily a boiler-shop clatter of machine-guns vomited useless frenzy.
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