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Wallaby Bill was pleasantly interested in watching this amiable performance, but it would have impressed him vastly more if he could have pictured to himself the sort of spectacle Finn had presented a couple of days before, when, with foaming jaws, gleaming fangs, raised hackles, and straining limbs, the great Wolfhound had pitted himself, with roaring fury, against the leather-coated man who wielded the hot iron.
If the Professor had continued his daily attempts to cow Finn, as a preliminary to training, he would have been likely to succeed at about this time; for the Wolfhound was losing strength daily, and though the fire of wrath and fierceness burned strongly when he saw the leather-coated man, it had little to feed on now, and must soon have died down under the hot bar and the wired whip.
Without undue exaggeration, he craned his neck, rounded his shoulders, and carried himself with the listless air of a Piccadilly idler. He reflected, too, that a bare-headed man in evening dress would not readily be identified with a leather-coated chauffeur, and Dale, he hoped, was sufficiently endowed with mother wit to frame a story plausible enough to account for his unforeseen appearance.
The stuffy sitting-room there is always filled with knickerbockered, leather-coated ladies and with officers in dark blue uniform, who talk loudly and pat the barmaid's cheeks. She seems to expect it; it is almost etiquette. Yesterday evening Lady Bagot dined with me. This Villa is the only comfortable place I have been in since the war began: it makes an amazing difference to my health.
We wrap ourselves in flying kit and cross the road to the aerodrome. There the band of leather-coated officers shiver while discussing their respective places in the formation. A bus lands and taxies to a shed. From it descends the Squadron Commander, who, with gum-boots and a warm coat over his pyjamas, has been "trying the air." "Get into your machines," he calls.
Those who met him in that showroom in Bond Street never dreamed of the alert leather-coated and helmeted figure who tore round the rough track at Brooklands testing cars, and so often rising up that steep cemented slope, the test of great speed. At six o'clock on the Wednesday evening he stood in his cosy room in Bennett Street awaiting Peggy.
After all those rich, those pink and happy Americans, leather-coated down to the humblest private, pockets full of money, and fat meals three times a day to keep their spirits up why shouldn't they let him have their cigarettes? "You can have this carton, too, if you like," she said, offering it. "I'll manage to slip in to-morrow morning."
And I know you are going to help me. You have such splendid self-control." Though there were sobs in her throat, she pressed her hands to her lips and stifled them. Only her pallor and her wet lashes showed the horror and grief she felt. I wanted desperately to comfort her, but there was no time for it; and besides, who ever heard of a leather-coated comforter in a kitchen garden at 5 A.M.?
Her sentiment for her leather-coated deliverer was little short of adoration. Gratitude seemed too poor a term. He had taken her from hell, and it seemed to her as they went up, up, up, they must be nearing heaven. At last he began flying in a direct line. Below was her former jailer, foaming at the mouth, and Pete, poor Pete, lying on the ground rolling in an agony of loss.
But the goggled, leather-coated masked man had already sprung out, his personal belongings in hand, and stumbled up the outer slope of the crater. Suddenly he was halted by the stern command: "Hands up you!" There was no mistaking Blaine's voice by one who had often heard it before. "Why, hullo, Lafe!" And Blaine and Stanley both recognized the wrecked intruder.
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