It was a long, narrow table set on the mountain edge of the terrace and half shaded, already, by the trees at the foot of the slope. Six chairs backed the lake and seven faced it. Bane pre-empted the central one of these and established Helen Lacey at his right; he sat her father at his left with Boggs beyond.
Pete, he placed directly opposite himself; and me two places away from Pete. The languid, green-eyed Gessler girl lounged between us.
"You must have jumped cleverly," she promptly opened the table conversation, complimenting Pete and surprising him.
"Jumped?" he asked; and she made her comment definite.
"With the parachute."
"Oh," said Pete. "Well, I got off."
"You're the first who did," she continued in the same flattering, deliberately drawling tone; and now she lowered her dark eyelids provokingly.
This provokement was not pointed at Pete; nor at me; nor at Boggs, whom I had identified as her especial adorer. He was this; but I realized, during the next few seconds, that she was utterly indifferent to his admiration. Bane, she played for; Bane, she sought to provoke; and at this, she instantly succeeded.
"You're served, Sally," he spoke to her in a warning, steel-like tone. He was so angry, I perceived, that he could devise no better interjection than to call attention to the cup placed before her.
Sally slowly and languorously opened her eyes to more than their natural wideness and gazed at him.
"I don't care for cold consomme," she cast at him; and Pete re-inforced her in her defiance.
"Fave there been many more?" he asked her.
"More?" For the moment, she had to think about Bane; she'd forgotten what she had just started, until Pete reminded her.
"More who tried to jump," he said.
"Well, you know about two, don't you?"
"Yes," said Pete. "I know about two. Were there others before Monday?"
"Not at sea," Sally said. "But—but—" she deliberated, meeting with level, half lifted lids Bane's glare at her and drawing the silk of her dress close about her figure. "Last week," she finished, turning casually to Pete, "surely you heard that a couple of pilots were Jost in the mountains."
"Not navy men," said Pete.
"No," agreed Sally. "One was army—the other a mail flyer."
At this, Bane cut in furiously. "That's a d—d lie," he denied.
"That an army pilot and a mail flyer were lost?" questioned Sally, turning to him. "Oh, I see what you mean; you didn't know he was a mail flyer until afterwards."
"Drop it," threatened Bane directly; and Sally looked down, breathing short, and decided to drop it.
Not from fear of him, I thought, but because she had thrust the affair temporarily as far as she wished; she had accomplished her present purpose. What? What had she been after in this planned provocation of him?
I glanced about the table where everyone now was served with chilled consomme but few were eating. I returned to Helen Lacey who sat with her brown hair bronze-gold in a shaft of the sun and with her grey eyes aghast before Sally Gessler, before Pete and me. Before Bane; for now she confronted him.
"The army pilot—and the mail flyer," she began.
"Fell!" declared Bane. "Fell; fell," he insisted; whereat Sally laughed and Helen Lacey looked at her, at Pete and me; she looked past Bane at her father; and she relapsed in her chair.
Pete, I saw, straightened a little; and I pulled up with warmer blood beating in me, too, as I became sure of the reason for this bold baiting of Bane. It was because the brown-haired girl beside him had not known of the actual adventures of her effigy which masked the pilot mechanism of that murderous monoplane; not only had she played no deliberate part in the scheme but she had not even known that she, in effigy, had sent down Selby and Kent and, a couple of hours ago, had attacked Pete and me. She had begun to guess it only after speaking to us on the sea.
Now she more than guessed; and more than guessed about the army pilot and the lost mail flyer, too. Undoubtedly other puzzling matters, bewildering bits which previously she had innocently explained but which fitted in no proper pattern in her mind, suddenly fell into place, too. I could see, as she shrank back and looked about the table and at Bane—again and again at Bane and shrank from him—that all this company and especially he assumed a new and frightful aspect to her.
He saw it; all the rest, and her father bowed in his seat, saw it too. Sally Gessler, slouching in the chair between Pete and me, witnessed it; and smiled at her success. Yes; so far, she had succeeded; and it was as far as she desired, just now.
The servants cleared away the chilled consomme and laid before us capon and greens from which, as from the iced bouillon, the brown head, in the shaft of the sun, shrank. The dark, indolent head between Pete and me inclined lazily as Sally Gessler cut the white slices of fowl with satisfied and triumphant knife and ate with slow, studied voluptuousness of her thin lips. Lazily she lifted her dark eye-lids and gazed across the table.
Pete and I proceeded to eat. I felt, actually, something like appetite started by this quarrel at the table. I realized, by contrast, that previously I had not believed there was any way out, for Pete and me, from the grip of this man, so "completely sane", who killed pilots for practice or his amusement and who armed himself with automatic airplanes and ton bombs of TNT. But this quarrel at the table seemed, slightly at least, to loosen his grip on me.
The girl across the table shrank under exactly the opposite sensation. She felt his grip suddenly fasten upon her. She had not appreciated, until now, his nature and the quality of his company and the character of his house. How was it that she was here?
I glanced again at her father. He had known. He was not of this company in its soul and purpose; but he had known. Sally Gessler had imparted nothing which surprised him. I recognized, now, that he, because he had known, had been a sort of prisoner here. His daughter, since she had learned, would be a prisoner hereafter, like Pete and me.
A servant—he was the valet who had attended us—came from the house and bent at Bane's ear, delivering a message.
Bane arose, and in the general direction of Donley, said, "Cawder."
"Hm," said Donley. "It's time."
"Back in a moment," said Bane, not to Donley, but to the rest of us. It was a sort of warning which said, in effect, "Stay as you are until I return."
"Who's Cawder?" calmly inquired Pete of Donley, when Bane disappeared.
"Oh; he's at headquarters."
"Headquarters?" said Pete and, for once betrayed surprise. "Isn't this headquarters?"
Donley laughed; Boggs laughed; Mendell and Kinvarra and Sally Gessler, too. They laughed not only at Pete, for his surprise, but at me for mine, which was as evident, and at the girl beside Bane's empty chair.
The sensation of a little loosening of the grip on me, was gone. Something tighter and more terrible pressed me in its place—something not to be slipped off by means of a mere quarrel between Sally Gessler and Bane.
Across the table in the sun, the brown head bent toward me. "I want a minute with you," said Helen Lacey suddenly to me.