A very different type, this, from the dark, sinewed master of Niss’rosh.  Bohannan was frankly red-haired, a bit stout, smiling, expansive.  His blood was undoubtedly Celtic.  An air of great geniality pervaded him.  His hands were strong and energetic, with oddly spatulate fingers; and the manner in which his nails had been gnawed down and his mustache likewise chewed, bespoke a highly nervous temperament belied by his ruddy, almost boyish face.  His age might have been thirty-five, but he looked one of those men who never fully grow up, who never can be old.

“Well, what’s doing now?” demanded he, fixing blue eyes on his host.  He produced a cigarette and lighted it, inhaled smoke deeply and blew a thin gray cloud toward the ceiling.  “Something big, eh? by the way you routed me out of a poker-game where I was already forty-seven dollars and a half to the good.  You don’t usually call a fellow, that way, unless there’s something in the wind!”

“There is, now.”

“Big?”

“Very.”

“So?” The newcomer’s eyes fell on the pistol.  “Yes, that looks like action, all right.  Hope to heaven it is!  I’ve been boring myself and everybody else to death, the past three months.  What’s up?  Duel, maybe?”

“Yes.  That’s just it, Bohannan.  A duel.”  And the Master fixed strange eyes on his companion.  His muscular fingers fell to tapping the prayer-rug on the table, drumming out an impatient little tattoo.

“Duel?  Lord’s sake, man!  With whom?”

“With Fate.  Now, listen!” The Master’s tones became more animated.  A little of the inward fires had begun to burn through his self-restraint.  “Listen to me, and not a word till I’m done!  You’re dryrotting for life, man.  Dying for it, gasping for it, eating your heart out for it!  So am I. So are twenty-five or thirty men we know, between us, in this city.  That’s all true, eh?”

“Some!”

“Yes!  We wouldn’t have to go outside New York to find at least twenty-five or thirty in the same box we’re in.  All men who’ve been through trench work, air work, life-and-death work on various fronts.  Men of independent means.  Men to whom office work and club life and all this petty stuff, here, is like dish-water after champagne!  Dare-devils, all of them, that wouldn’t stop at the gates of Hell!”

“The gates of Hell?” demanded Bohannan, his brow wrinkling with glad astonishment.  “What d’you mean by that, now?”

“Just what I say!  It’s possible to gather together a kind of unofficial, sub rosa, private little Foreign Legion of our own, Bohannan—­all battle-scarred men, all men with at least one decoration and some with half a dozen.  With that Legion, nothing would be impossible!”

He warmed to his subject, leaned forward, fixed eager eyes on his friend, laid a hand on Bohannan’s knee.  “We’ve all done the conventional thing, long enough.  Now we’re going to do the unconventional thing.  We’ve been all through the known.  Now we’re going after the unknown.  And Hell is liable to be no name for it, I tell you that!”