“What else?”

“Two squadrons have been started westward across the Atlantic, already, to capture or destroy us.”

“Indeed?  Where from?” The Master spoke coldly.  This information, far from seeming important to him as it had to Menendez, appeared the veriest commonplace.  It was nothing but what he had expected and foreseen.  He smiled grimly as he listened to the radio man’s answer: 

“One squadron has started from Queenstown.  The other from the Azores—­from St. Michaels.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, sir, now and then I can get a few words they’re sending from plane to plane—­or from plane to headquarters.  They mean business.  It’s capture or kill.  They’re rating us as pirates.”

“Very well.  Anything really important?”

“Nothing else, sir.”

“Keep me informed, if any real news comes in.  But don’t disturb me with trifles!”

The Master hung up the receiver, sat back in his chair and stretched his long, powerful legs under the desk.  He set both elbows on the arms of the chair, joined his finger-tips and sank his lips upon them.

“I’d better be rigging that vibratory apparatus before long,” he reflected.  “But still, there’s no immediate hurry.  Time enough for all that.  Lots of time.”

His thoughts wandered from Nissr and the great adventure, from the coming attackers, from the vibratory apparatus, yes from the goal of all this undertaking itself, back to “Captain Alden.”  The who and why, the whence and whither of this strange woman urgently intruded on his mind; nor by any effort of the will could he exclude these thoughts.

For a long time, while Nissr roared away eastward, ever eastward into the night, he sat there, sunk in a profound revery.

“A woman,” he whispered, finally, the words lingering on his lips.  “A woman, eh?  Strange—­very strange!”

Resolutely he forced himself to consider the plans he had laid out; his success thus far; the means he meant to take with the attacking squadrons; the consummation of his whole campaign so vast, so overpowering in its scope.

But through it all, persisted other thoughts.  And these, he found, he could not put away.

The buzzer of the desk-telephone again recalled him to himself.  “Hello, hello?”

“I have to report that a third squadron has been ordered into the air, from Monrovia,” announced Menendez.

“Very well!  Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

The Master hung up the receiver, arose, and seemed to shake himself from the kind of torpor into which his thoughts of the woman had plunged him.

“Enough of this nonsense!” growled he.  “There’s work to be done—­work!”

With fresh energy he flung himself into the task of planning how to meet and to repel the three air-fleets now already on the westward wing to capture or annihilate the Flying Legion.