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Updated: June 9, 2025
Among them the Master saw Leclair and Rrisa. No one showed fear. The white feather was not visible; but a grim tension had developed. Death, imminent, sobers the boldest. From the engine-room, shouts, orders, were echoing. The engine-room door flung open. Smoke vomited thick, choking, gray. Auchincloss reeled out, clutching at his throat. "What chance?" the Master cried, staggering toward him.
The lieutenant's orderly, now having recovered strength, had pleaded so hard for an opportunity to avenge himself on the hated Moslems that Leclair had taken him. As for Lombardo, he had downright insisted on going.
In the sand near the wady lay buried Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them so as to leave as little trace as possible. Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have most abominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab. Not all his long experience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a dead camel-driver.
For more than an hour, Nissr's shadow leaped across this utter solitude of death. The Master summoned Leclair, Bohannan, and "Captain Alden," and for some time gave them careful instructions which none but they were allowed to hear. All this time, the strange, yellowish sheen against the heavens was increasing. What might lie beyond the mountains who could tell?
As the last of them entered, the outer door collapsed with a bursting clangor. Lights gleamed; a white-robed tumult of raging men burst through. Shots crackled; yells echoed; and the sound of many sandaled feet, furiously running, filled the outer chamber with sounds of ominous import. "Ah, sacrés cochons!" shouted Leclair, emptying his pistol at the pursuers. The Master thrust him back.
"You have now fifteen minutes, men," said he, "before the paralyzing shock of that silent detonation that noiseless release of molecular energies which does not kill nor yet destroy consciousness in the least will pass away. So " "You mean to tell me, my Captain, those pilgrims are still conscious?" demanded Leclair, amazed. "Perfectly. They will see, hear, and know all you do. I wish them to.
The body of Gorlitz, trapped there, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at any rate, no longer remained. Four Legionaries were in the pilot-house: the Master, Bohannan, Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence. There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke. "Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of the altimeter.
"Out, men, and at it!" the major commanded, as he scrambled from the nacelle, slid and stumbled over the Moslems, and reached hands for the tools passed out to him. Leclair followed. Men and tools were swiftly unloaded, leaving only Wallace and Emilio at their guns, as agreed.
The Master, half-way along the line with Leclair, Rrisa, the major and "Captain Alden," mentally took stock of losses thus far sustained. The dead: Kloof, Sheffield, Beziers, Travers, Gorlitz, Auchincloss, Daimamoto. Twenty-four living remained, including Leclair. The mortality, in about eighteen hours, had been twenty percent.
The destroyer was now driving in at full speed, with black smoke streaming from four funnels, perfectly indifferent to possible shoals, rocks or sand-bars along this uncharted coast. Another shell screamed under the lower gallery and burst in a deluge of sand near one of the mooring-piles. "Very poor shooting, my Captain," smiled Leclair, leaning far out the port window of the pilot-house.
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