The figures were faint but freshly written, without blurring. They bore no resemblance to a laundry mark. They suggested to me a message.
Their interpretation, at that moment, was wholly puzzling, but their purpose seemed to me, clearly, to convey some information of special and highly personal significance. A girl had pencilled them, I thought. They were large and flourishy figures with feminine twists; and, as I looked at them, I thought of not Helen Lacey but Sally Gessler.
Of course I examined everything else on the tray and the tray itself; but nothing explained them. There they were by themselves, in their pencilled flourishes; and they had been sent to me to tell me, what?
They might be intelligence of the strength of airplane squadrons; they might refer to distances; they might apply to—anything. But whatever their interpretation, already they meant to me that someone in the house was secretly scheming forme. And this someone, I believed to be Sally Gessler.
I knew that Helen Lacey would help me, if she could; and it might be that she had pencilled these figures; but they attached in my mind to Sally and her particular sort of scheming against Bane.
I dampened the center of the napkin, obliterated the figures and ate supper with better appetite than I would have credited a few minutes before. Something more promising than the chance of my removing a stone mullion in a tower window, was afoot in the house.
The same servants who had brought the tray, removed it together with the tableware and the napkin now innocent of numerals. Nothing else was sent me; no one else called. Night spread over the cloudless and moonless sky.
The first hour of darkness continued like the day; airplanes pushed into the water, rose and were tested; airscrews drummed and droned; lights streaked across the stars and the spread of wings eclipsed the constellations. But shortly after nine o'clock, this ceased. The sky, the lake, the land became silent. Lights switched out; everything and everyone was prepared for the enterprise of the morning which would proceed, undoubtedly, as it was planned.
I lay down, trying to picture the enterprise prevented. How? By warning to Pete's and my seaplane squadron? What warning would have reached them?
Probably they had found Pete's machine wrecked on the sea; so they had reported him lost after a parachute jump. Me, they would have reported as lost, machine and all. Our disappearance must have puzzled them; but it would have given them no real warning.
I lay trying to sleep but succeeded at semiconsciousness only in which suddenly I was jerked by the shock of the sensation of being "danced", with my hands cuffed with steel, in an airplane with radio control—and a madman running the radio. That was what Bane meant by the bit I'd been through with rather more before me. Rather more before Pete, too? And what before her?
I twisted over, clutching at the couch.
My door was opened, without any preliminary rap, by two men who switched on the light and-returned to me my own clothing.
"You're flying today; put these on," one commanded me.
Flying? Yesterday I had flown, being "danced"; then my borrowed garments had sufficed. There was a new implication this morning.
I did not imagine that Bane's mind was so broken that he fancied me converted to his plan; no, he had some other idea of his own regarding me. It involved me in flight, perhaps "dancing" again. Nevertheless, I put on my own clothes and was led out under the stars. The time was three.
Women and men whispered and embraced on the terrace; I made out Mendell's voice and his wife's sobbing a goodbye; I heard Sally Gessler speak; Boggs replied. I listened and looked, in the starlight, for Helen Lacey. She was not discoverable by me.
Pete spoke to me, "Hello".
I answered and they pulled us further apart, escorting him first to the pier.
Airplanes were rising from the lake; the darkness drummed with their drone. They put Pete in a boat and shoved me aboard another which was rowed out to a moored monoplane; and as I stood in the boat, I heard Helen Lacey's voice:
"You said I'd be with you."
"You'll be with me," replied Bane.
"No!" This came in a cry of protest. It was not a reply to him; she was trying, helplessly, to stop something which was being done.
"All right now," said Bane. "You'll be all right; you'll come back—if I do."
She made no reply. A monoplane flew up from the water; immediately another followed it.
I was thrust aboard the seaplane beside which I stood and lifted into the seat pit.
Expecting to have my hands cuffed behind me as yesterday, I grasped a control wheel in front of me. No one opposed this, except to shift my hands slightly whereupon a steel clamp came down. Someone twisted a lock bar and secured me; someone else buckled the ordinary straps over my shoulders.
I yelled across the water to warn Pete, in case they were trying the same trick with him and a shout of his echoed to me. They had trussed us both; and though a pilot remained with me, I knew it was only to take me into the air.
When he had me high over the lake, he leaped and I was alone again, flying with my, hands clamped to a wheel which was only a dummy. It connected with no controls; the actual control was by radio.
I was swung to right, to left, lifted a little and jerked left again. This did not feel like the "dancing" of yesterday. Other airplanes flew in front and behind me and on both sides. I was aware that I was manœuvered to put me in alignment in some formation.
A plane passed me close; but I thought it was unintentional. It blundered by so stupidly that I was sure that it also was run by radio. I saw a head and shoulders before the stars. It might have been another man, trussed like me; it might have been a wood and wax effigy. His head did not move and he had no guidance of his plane.
Someone, however, pulled him into position; the squadron straightened and flew toward the dawn. Not only the stars now gave direction; the east evidenced itself with a pallid promise of light. Eight machines composed the squadron in which I flew—eight monoplanes proceeding by pairs; for we held no real squadron formation. In front of me, flew two machines—the one which had nearly hit me and another which seemed to control it. Behind me was a machine which, I felt, piloted me. On my right, flew two similar pairs.
Four radio-controlled machines, four manpiloted monoplanes composed our squadron. At a distance to my left, and too dimly seen to be counted, flew another formation; and we all flew fast. The early morning lights of New Jersey towns and cities twinkled below us and before the east paled grey we picked up the glow of New York and passed it southward, putting out over the sea and holding, on our left, Long Island.
We were flying, relative to the air, five miles a minute, I estimated, and the drift of the sky favored us as I could witness from the smoke of steamers as we swept out to sea. It was not yet twenty minutes since we had risen from the lake in the hills and we were over the ocean in force, commanding the sky and the water with power to work whatever we wished.
Because the machines in my immediate squadron flew in four pairs, I supposed that the four subordinates of the luncheon table on the terrace were the pilots—Boggs and Donley, Mendell and Kinvarra. Bane was not in this formation, I believed. I was sure, at least, that he was not piloting me; for the impulses which swung me to right or left and increased or decreased the speed of my engine, to keep me in position, reached me in manner unlike yesterday. Another hand held me. Other hands held Pete and the two effigies in the other radio-controlled machines. The dawn was displaying them to me.
In front of me flew, first, a monoplane with a dummy in the pilot's pit; behind it flew Boggs, I believed. On my right flew another effigy of a man; next Donley, I thought; then flew Pete, cuffed and strapped. I guessed that Mendell controlled him and Kinvarra steered me. But I could feel, by the way we all were steered and shifted, that command was not in our squadron; our whole formation obeyed orders from elsewhere. This elsewhere must be the squadron of six machines which had started the journey on our left but which now was flying below us.
Rather, we had risen above this other squadron, which had held to a height of five thousand feet. We flew at eight thousand, I guessed.
Four of them were double or triple-seaters; two seemed to be singles. One of the big machines was the flag-ship, undoubtedly. Bane was aboard it. Aboard it with him, was she?
In my ears, with the drum of the motors, was her cry which had come to me in the darkness on the lake:
"'You said I'd be with you!'"
"'You'll be with me,'" said Bane.
"'No!'"
From the north emerged four larger machines—biplanes with long, lozenge-like pendants below them. Bombers, they were—the seaplanes bearing Bane's ton bombs of TNT. Their appearance caused only slight shift of our course; their timing was almost perfect for their appointment. Undoubtedly they talked, back and forth by radio, with our flag-ship; and after they joined us, our speed decreased to theirs. They flew lowest, perhaps two thousand feet above the sea.
On the ocean lay a sharp elliptical seed. The white wash of a wake declared that it moved but its advance was so slow in comparison to ours that it seemed simply to lie on the sea and swell as we flew at it.
Toward it we leaped at three levels, the four bombing biplanes lowest; above them, the squadron of six; then, we. Swiftly, in the magic manner of objects approached by airplane, the seed expanded and lengthened and stood out of the water until it became a ship. A minute more, and it was no mere ship. Longer and wider and higher out of the ocean it grew until it became, beyond doubt, the Wotan on her maiden voyage, the greatest vessel on the seas!