Bane flung back the door. The force and abruptness of it declared him before we saw him.
"Here you are!" he greeted me. "Had your little talk, have you?"
"We've had a little talk," I admitted, manifestly.
"I was sending you," he mocked me by exaggerated deference in his manner, "up to your room to rest. You've been through a bit: and you've rather more before you. You want rest; you'd better go to your room."
I stepped into the hallway with him. He was the stronger; the mechanic was there; also my hands were cuffed together with steel. The moment, however, probably offered my best chance of escape and I tried to take it with the result that I was flung down, allowed to rise and thereupon led to a little room in one of the rounded towers which presided over the lake.
The mechanic twisted at the band about my wrists and removed the cuffs before he left me. He merely locked me in and I was perfectly prisoned.
The door of the little room proved, upon investigation, to be of steel grained like wood; the two windows were tall and mullioned. Exteriorly, or if considered casually from within, they appeared to have been designed simply for a picturesque effect; but actually the stone mullions divided the panes into such narrow slits that no one possibly could press through.
I heard through the ceiling the steady pacing of feet and I realized that above me was a similar room confining Pete, probably.
With respect to Pete also, Bane had some idea of his own. Undoubtedly before Pete, as well as before myself, stretched a considerable experience; and before the girl who blamed herself for it all.
Where was she? With Bane? Or locked up like me?
Through the tall slits between the mullions, I inspected the lake and the bit of beach where wheels were being removed from monoplanes and pontoons put on. One by one, separately always to avoid show of many machines, the seaplanes rose, were tested and returned.
Single-seaters and two-seaters with machine guns, they were. The great weight-carriers for the ton bombs were not hangared here. This place specialized in the combat and pursuit types—and radio controlled machines run by automatons.
These were the escorts and protectors of the bombing biplanes being mustered elsewhere—just over the hills, perhaps, upon another lake or on waters a hundred miles away. Or perhaps they were being prepared singly, not to be gathered and squadroned until tomorrow's dawn when they would be drawn, by radio commands, to the determined positions in the path of the Wotan, on her maiden voyage, with her great passenger list, her cargo of paintings, diamonds, emeralds, platinum and gold.
How simply the airplanes could strike, with no warning given!
I thought, now, not of mere robbery and the seizure of the ship under the threat of bombs. I thought of the ton bombs poised under airplanes hovering above the ship—and of Bane's broken brain. I went again to the steel panels of the door. I went to the window and tried with my pocket knife to pick the mortar from between the stones of the mullions.
With my supper—I supposed they would send me supper—I might procure a better implement. But with my supper something different arrived.
A servant, accompanied by another who attended to the opening and fastening of the door, laid a tray and departed.
I sat at the little table, shaking out the napkin which lay on the tray, when in the center of the clean white square of linen, three pencilled numerals caught my eye, 18—35—21.