The same image, I knew, was in Pete's thought as in mine; it was of a test we had witnessed of one of the new navy bombs of TNT which blew apart and sent down, in one terrific detonation, a great armored battleship.
"Suppose," said Pete, thinking again out loud, "he drops one of those things in a street—a New York street. Remember when somebody dropped from a cart a bomb—it had half a pound of dynamite, perhaps—in Wall Street?"
I nodded.
"Ten bombs," iterated Pete, "from airplanes piloted by him—completely sane. The idea of the dummy," Pete continued, recollecting the mechanical pilot, "becomes clearer. He'll install it on a weight-carrying plane, load it with TNT and send it where he wants. Evidently he was simply practicing control of the thing with Selby and Kent—and you and me."
I thought, not of the mechanism of the thing, but of the effigy—the likeness of the girl, Helen Lacey. What did it mean that he so used her effigy? What was she in this affair?
Voices floated to us through the open windows; the clink of glass and china and silver told me that the table was laid. I heard Bane's voice, not hers; but Bane's tone told me that she was there; and I went to the window and saw her.
A servant knocked and entered. "Luncheon will be served at once, sirs," he announced.
"Put on this other suit," Pete urged me, when the man was gone. "We might as well both be presentable. I don't need to be the seventh son of a seventh son to hint to you that neither of us are likely to leave this place except by special permission. Hurry up. Let's not keep luncheon waiting. I'll say one thing for our host," Pete was looking out of the window. "He's not superstitious. He's having thirteen at his table."
There were six men and five girls making, with ourselves, thirteen when we came down to the terrace. Except for one man, older than the rest, they were the same people whom we had seen on our way into the house. The valet, evidently, had told us the truth; we had seen the company of the place except Helen Lacey's father.
Bane, himself managing the introductions, presented us, properly, first to the four girls who had eyed us on our way to the house. "Mrs. Donley," he called a fuzzy, over-rouged blonde with baby-blue eyes. "Miss Gessler," was a languid, green-eyed girl with long, slender limbs and thin, sensuous lips. She had a habit of smoothing her silk dress, drawing it closer to her figure. Boggs evidently was her especial admirer.
The third girl by name also was a maiden, "Miss Cleet." I never saw her again after this luncheon and there was nothing about her definitely to be remembered, except that she was feminine and young and apparently delighted a brick-red haired youth whom I was to meet, in a moment. The fourth girl was married; Mrs. Mendell.
Her husband, Mendell, was a stolid appearing person to be a pilot; he had a strong, heavy frame which seemed slow; but he surprised me by speaking quickly and by the flash in his small, scheming eyes when we looked each other over. The brick-red haired youth, who was as tall as Pete or Donley, went by the name of Kinvarra, of which he was proud; for he spelled it, to me after Bane pronounced it.
These two patently teamed in a sort of foursome with Boggs and Donley; and I recognized in them the nucleus of Bane's accepted corps of assistants. They were a heterogeneous quartet but they displayed one strong characteristic in common; each man meant to get for himself what he was after.
Not that I received the impression of discord between them. Quite to the contrary, all was amity; for of course they needed to work together and they all realized it.
In fact, they evidently appreciated the advantage of further re-inforcement; so they looked over Pete and me, considering our qualities as prospective partners in the business which engaged them.
None of them was of the class of Bane; none of them harbored his almost evangelical intensity. I did not have to wonder what tremendous personal experience had turned them to his enterprize; the prospect of easy prey and loot was sufficient to explain them. They were practical souls of the sort readily swept together at the promise of wealth and power to be gained at no greater price than the risk of their necks.
None of them was capable of conceiving and designing the great plan which possessed Bane; mentally, cracked as he was, he was their leader. None of them contested that. They were banded together behind him—each for his own advantage.
Their women—the two wives and the two sweethearts—stood together in a somewhat more suspicious alliance. They did not comprehend as clearly as the men, I thought, the project on hand; but they knew it to be barbaric and magnificent and it fascinated them.
A little apart, and contrasting with them in bearing and mood, was a grey and brooding man of fifty.
"Mr. Lacey," Bane called him, with a queer mixture of respect and suspicion. Mr. Lacey was slight of build, like his daughter, and endowed with the dignity which, even in his brooding mood of depression, declared him a man of good birth and breeding. Obviously, he was out of place among these other companions of Bane; he shared nothing with them—least of all their expectant excitement. He knew the purpose of these airplanes and pilots with their tons of TNT and the knowledge overwhelmed him. He examined Pete and me with dull, absent-minded eyes.
He seemed, for a moment, familiar to me. Somewhere, under very different conditions, I had seen him; or perhaps it was his picture in a newspaper. His name, Lacey, as Bane repeated it, struck me more familiarly, too; it ought to carry some connotation. What? I wondered and tried to recall, as I shook hands with him.
His daughter hovered at his elbow, and he gazed at her with the same absent-minded, haunting stare which she answered with a smile of her lips; not of her eyes.
A servant circulated a tray of cocktails to which the girls helped themselves. The pilots, each in his turn, referred to Bane who shook his head and none of them touched a glass. Nor did Pete nor I. If they preferred clear wits for the afternoon, so did we.
"Come to the table," Bane commanded and everybody obeyed.