There she was, in a dress of white and blue, with a bit of a band of blue at her collar. There she was with her hands bare and white and lovely; there she was with her glorious brown hair shining in the sun; there she was, the girl of the gauntlet who had talked with us on the sea and then drawn us up to the cloud ceiling where she had left us to meet the attack of her effigy while, lady-bug she, she had flown away home and had changed to this pretty dress of white and blue. There she was; and Pete, gazing at her, completely accused her.
I. I did not, completely. The sight of her now, and the memory of her in the minutes she had been with us on the sea, confused me; and then there was that wonder, in my mind, about the actual meaning of the effigy which I could not answer in the ready terms which satisfied Pete.
She started to speak, I thought, when we were several yards off; but she restrained her impulse and waited, looking at Pete, at me, and at Pete, until my float scraped on the rock. Then she said, "I'm glad you got here."
It was not, I felt certain, what first she had planned to say. No; something else had been in her mind. "I'm glad you got here," she repeated.
That was a welcome which gave men, in our situation, the choice, certainly, of interpreting it in two widely divergent ways.
Pete provided the reply.
"I'm glad to be here, and somewhat surprised," he said, stepping on the stone pier. "And I hardly feel you were expecting us," he cast at her coolly.
"Expecting you?" she repeated.
"Were you?"
She studied him and then me with serious, troubled eyes; she was not merely the pretty, puzzled girl who had captivated me on the sea.
I climbed from the cockpit, giving over charge of my plane to the men who had towed us.
A man in a trim, tan suit descended from the terrace to the pier. The girl turned and, seeing him, started with an impulse which she checked, as she had the one of the minute before. She stepped back from us a little, giving place to him.
He was as tall as Pete and heavier; in age, I placed him half-way between Pete's twenty-three years and my own twenty-eight. In energy and self-confidence I rated him beyond either of us, indeed beyond anyone I had ever seen.
The girl, I guessed, was used to encounters with him in which she had come off second best. There was contest between them. Whatever their relations, conquest of one over the other was not yet complete. This was the impression of that instant which excited and stirred me. Of course, liking her, I did not like him.
In any case, I think, he would have aroused antagonism in another man. I know now that he aimed at it.
He was good looking enough; I know some women held him handsome. He had sandy hair, exactly and aggressively brushed back; he had sandy, aggressive brows and a small, particularly assertive moustache. He was wide at the brow, equally wide at the jaw, narrow at the chin; he looked over Pete and then he looked over me with greyish, indolent eyes.
"Henry," she said to him in some sort of protest. He said nothing to her; he hardly looked at her but he reached for her hand and enclosed it in his own while he continued to favor us with his indolent scrutiny.
It was largely assumed, I realized; it was a pose which he perfected. He not only was assertive but he possessed a natural alertness and aliveness which would make the air service pick the man, at sight, for a pilot. You could count upon the accuracy and steadiness of his hand under all conditions. Physically he was muscle and bone; and the correlation of his mind with his muscle must be excellent; his reaction time, infinitesimal.
Reaction time, you know, is the interval which elapses between the moment a man's brain receives an impression and the instant when his hand acts in obedience to the stimulus in the brain. It is essential, in flying, that this time be exceedingly brief.
I was sure that this man flew, not only because he was so eminently fit for it, but because his bearing, besides being aggressive, was proprietory. He owned this place and those airplanes; he wanted to be, also, proprietor of the girl.
For all his self-assertion, for all his pose of indolence, he was under a slight tension. He had just finished a long flight, I suspected. The tension was of that sort. Moreover, I noticed now that his linen was crumpled though his coat was faultless. He had cast off a leather jacket, I guessed, and hurriedly donned this to drive from the other side of the lake to meet us.
He must have been flying one of the blue monoplanes upon the opposite beach; and he, having had a part in the events of this morning, never would have played a petty rôle. He had not been the pilot who merely had risen to put another aboard the effigy plane; nor had he been the pilot transferred from plane to plane to land the vehicle of the automaton. He had been the man, I believed, who had waited for us above the cloud ceiling and, with his slave plane, tried to send us down.
I believed him, therefore, to be the man who had killed Selby and Kent.
"You had a little trouble?" he inquired casually of me.
"A little," I told him.
"What?" He was making it, I realized, a test of me.
"We ran short of fuel," I answered.
"Nothing else wrong?"
"No."
"Come up to my house," he invited us, with a special possessiveness in the 'my.' "Bane's my name. You must be Carrick."
I nodded.
"You're Logan," he said to Pete, who made no reply to him.
By name he had known us, then, when he had tried to send us after Selby and Kent. By name, undoubtedly, he had known them. It had been no anonymous business upon which he had been engaged in the sky; he personally had picked his people.
Pete, ignoring Bane, spoke to the girl.
"You didn't mention your name when we were discussing how you lost your glove."
"Oh, I'm Helen Lacey."
I liked the sound of that. She was not Bane's wife; she was not wholly Bane's yet.
I saw Pete lift his head a little. He liked the sound of it, too, whatever might be his opinion of Helen Lacey. Her eyes rested solicitously upon Pete. Bane saw it and did not like that.
"You must be still soaked through," she said.
"Oh, no," said Pete. "I'm dryer. I've had quite a ride in the wind."
"I'll send you other clothes," offered Bane brusquely and interrupted words between them by beckoning down and introducing a short, wiry, black-haired, black-moustached youth whom he called Boggs and a pallid pilot of twenty-five designated as Donley.
They had accompanied Bane, I thought, from the other side of the lake; and I picked Donley as the probable pilot of the third monoplane and Boggs as the man who had made the transfer in the air to land the effigy's machine.
Bane was leading Helen Lacey and Pete along the pier and trying to stop them from speaking; he did not quite succeed at that but he did prevent them from words alone.
"I wish you'd tell me," I heard her beg Pete; and he laughed at her, somewhat as he had laughed on the sea.
"I don't know; I don't!" she protested to him; and Bane stopped all that by appropriating her hand again and drawing her to the other side of himself, away from Pete.
My companions, or escorts if you prefer, offered conversation with me solely on such casual topics as the weather, types of motors and wings. They were singularly devoid of any such concern as troubled Helen Lacey.
So we came up to the terrace where two more men and four women—girls, they were; everyone about the place was young—gazed at us. A couple of them spoke to Bane and Boggs but neither offered further introductions. We went on to the house and into a large, wide lounge gaily and coolly decorated in blues and yellows and where were pretty, painted chairs and little tables for cards and tea.
By all appearances, we were being welcomed at a summer country dwelling of a gentleman of taste and leisure and, if the pictures and bronzes were of his own selection, a dilettante in art.
A broad, stone stairway led upward; and we all proceeded toward it, playing the outward rôles of guests and hosts—all but the girl, Helen Lacey.
She suddenly freed her hand from Bane's appropriation and spun about to me.
"What happened after I left you?" she begged of me.
Bane also had swung about; and Boggs and Donley, suggestive less of hosts, at this moment, than of bailiffs, drew a little closer to me. She was pale and she bit her lips between her white teeth to stop their trembling as she faced me.
Bane, after his swift swing about, was become so indolent that he half closed his eyes while he watched me.
"Tell her all about it, Carrick," he invited me. "She knows we must have met; she knows that is how you found the way here. Tell her exactly how I treated you."
"Nothing happened after you left us," I replied to her. "Nothing at all; except we did meet Bane and followed him."
"I don't know about it. I tell you I don't know what it is," she said seriously as a girl could speak; and again had to hold her lips from trembling. "Do you believe me?"
"Yes," I said; and, looking at her, I did.
"Will you go up?" Bane invited Pete in a tone which made it a challenge. Pete accepted it and I went with him beside Bane while Boggs and Donley trailed along. Helen Lacey remained downstairs.
They led us to a bed-chamber on the east upon the second floor, a large luxurious room overlooking the lake.
"I'll send someone to you," said Bane and with Boggs and Donley, he went away.