“Ready in the lower gallery now, with the winch and tackles!” bade the Master.

Again came:  “Yes, sir!” from the man in charge of the three who already knew perfectly well what was expected of them.  As Nissr slowly turned, a trap opened in the bottom of her lower gallery, almost directly between the two forward vacuum-floats, and down sped a little landing nacelle or basket at the end of a fine steel cable.

Swiftly the electric winch dropped the nacelle, containing three men.  It slowed, at their command, through the phone that led up the wire.  With hardly a jar, the basket landed on the roof.

The men jumped out, made fast their tackles to Captain Alden’s plane there, leaped in again and signaled:  “Hoist away!”

With noiseless speed the winch gathered in the cable.  Up swooped the nacelle.  As it cleared the roof, Nissr purred forward, slid away, gathered speed over the city where already the alarm had been given.

In four minutes the men had safely landed in the lower gallery once more, and the plane was being hoisted by davits and made fast on the upper platform, known as the take-off, which served as a runway for planes leaving the ship or alighting thereon.

Over the light-spangled city the giant air-liner gathered way.  Three or four searchlights had already begun trying to pick her up.  Quiverings of radiance reached out for her, felt into the void, whirled like cosmic spokes.  The Brooklyn Navy Yard whipped the upper air for her.  Down on Sandy Hook, a slim spear of light stabbed questingly through the night.  Then all at once the monster light on Governor’s Island caught her, dazzling into the Master’s eyes.

He only smiled, as he sheered eastward, dropped East River behind and unloosed the Sky-eagle’s course above Brooklyn.

“Just a little fireworks, as a send-off, Major,” said he, notching the speed ahead, ever ahead, till a whipping gale began to beat in at the broken pane.  “They got word of it pretty quick, eh?  I suppose they’ll send up a few planes after us.”

“After us, yes!” exulted the major.  “Faith, they’ll be after us, all right—­a devil of a long way after!”

To this the Master gave no answer, but signaled Auchincloss in the engine-room for full speed.  Now a subtle tremor possessed the vast fabric, mistress of the upper spaces and the night.  The close-compacted lights beneath commenced to sprinkle out into tenuous dots.  The tiny blazing fringe of Coney burned a moment very far below, then slid away, under the glass flooring.  Still heading sharply upward, with altimeter needle steadily mounting, with the cold becoming ever greater, the liner flung herself out boldly over the jet plain of ocean.

Right into the eye of heaven she seemed to point, into a vast and profound blackness, that, as the Master snicked off the no-longer needed searchlight, unleashed myriad stars—­stars which leaped out of the velvet night.  Already man and the works of man lay far behind.  If there had been any tentative pursuit, the Legionaries knew nothing of it.  Outdistancing pursuit as an eagle distances sparrows, the liner gloried in her swift trajectory.