"He's going to do it! The other—he's just talking yet. He's not ready yet, even if he wants to do it. But he—he's ready and he's going to do it."
"Yes," I said; there was no denying it. He—the he who was ready and would do it—of course was Bane. The other was Cawder. There was no confusion between us; we felt the same thing. Cawder, the cripple, had first conceived the frightful enterprise. Broken in body and inverted in soul by his awful injury, he had found vent for his tremendous energies in a grandiloquent dream. His cynicism, consequent to his injury, became increased in his partnership with gunmen, blackmailers, bootleggers and the gentry who enriched and empowered themselves through terrorizing with bombs. Not real bombs, as Cawder had said; only home-made-grenades.
Naturally, having been a flyer, he knew of real bombs; and his mind multiplied the effect of the half pint grenades by two thousand pounds of TNT and gave him the picture which he saw.
So, on his bed or in his chair where he had to hold himself up with his hands, he began amusing himself with building his plan and talking about it.
He might merely have continued to talk, had not Bane come in. His talk and his scheme struck dry tinder in Bane's broken mind; it fired Bane's mood. Bane seized the idea and, not bound to any bed nor to any chair where he had to hold himself upright with his hands, Bane busied himself. He recruited men from Cawder's organization to practice what Cawder preached. Bane became the driving force, driving—or attempting to drive—Cawder himself.
For Cawder was holding back; Cawder still talked only of the grandiloquent scheme which could never be completely prepared. Bane moved for immediate results; he had in hand a project which he could pursue.
"He has his airplanes and bombs to attack a ship at sea!"
"Yes," I said; there was no denying that.
"A passenger ship—a great one like the Lusitania!"
"I brought him to it."
"Not you!"
"Father and I."
"You may still stop him!" I said, holding her tight under my hands.
"How?"
"He's coming back," I said, and released her.
"Cawder," said Bane, pushing the panel, "will talk to you again."
I started with her.
"Not you," said Bane and thrust me off. He was distinctly triumphant; he had won his point against Cawder.
"I want to talk to Mr. Cawder," said Helen; and I made no further useless protest. Bane led her away and closed the panel, confining me. For a few seconds I heard their steps; then, nothing more. No one returned. I was shut in the little cubby where at last, after long resultless wondering about her—where she was, what she did or what had been done with her and what would be done with me—I finally slept. For at four o'clock, when the panel was opened, my callers had to awaken me.
They were a pair of men of the type of Sander and Larkin; and their errand was to escort me to the roof where it was dawn and where a two-seater airplane stood ready to fly.
"Mr. Bane?" I questioned them.
"He's gone ahead."
"East?" I asked.
"Ahead," was all they would tell me; and their answers regarding Miss Lacey were the same. She had gone "ahead" with Mr. Bane. Of Cawder, they vouchsafed nothing at all.
They invited me into the passenger's seat of the airplane; and the invitation left me no option. When I was seated, they applied straps of the familiar sort which hold a pilot, or a passenger, in place when an airplane tilts. Suddenly they added another strap, binding my hands together behind me and with a steel band, they locked my wrists.
One man went to the pilot's pit. After a moment, we were in the air. Eastward, toward the sunrise, we flew; and except that I was strapped and fettered, I did not feel anything extraordinary in the flight until we were fifty miles from the city and over Indiana farmland.
Then the pilot stood up, climbed from his pit and went out upon the right wing. The monoplane maintained its steady flight. Still this did not amaze me; for an airplane, without guidance, is likely to cling to its course for a while.
I saw, then, my pilot play with the little guide parachute over the pack on his back. He was preparing to jump. He jumped!
Below me and behind, his parachute opened; his fall became a float. I was alone, strapped—and fettered, in the passenger seat of the mono plane.
Still it stayed steady; still it clung to its course, correcting itself by slight shifts of the controls which could not be wholly automatic. So I realized what was being done with me.
I had been put aboard an airplane like the effigy's, a monoplane with radio controls. A pilot in another plane held my fate. Bane? I wondered. I searched the sunrise for sight of the control machine. Bane? And was she with him?
My passage westward, I have said, had been mere transportation. My return, I realized, was to be anything but that.