The Master’s hand slid over the desk and rested a moment on a button there.  A certain slight tremor passed through the Frenchman’s body.  Into his eyes leaped an expression of wonder, of astonishment.  His mouth quivered, as if he would have spoken; but he remained dumb.  The hand that held his cigarette, resting on his knee, relaxed; the cigarette fell, smoldering, to the metal plate.  And on the instant the fire in it died, extinguished by some invisible force.

“Are you prepared to sign a receipt for this airship, if I deliver her over to you, sir?” demanded the Master, still speaking in French.  He smiled oddly.

No answer.  A certain swelling of the Frenchman’s throat became visible, and his lips twitched slightly, but no sound was audible.  A dull flush mounted over his bronzed cheek.

“Ah, you do not answer?” asked the other, with indulgent patronage.  “I assume, however, that you have the authority to accept my surrender and that of my crew.  I assume, also, that you are willing to sign for the airship.”  He opened a drawer, took a paper, and on it wrote a few words.  These he read over carefully, adding a comma, a period.

Leclair watched him with fixed gaze, struggling against some strange paralysis that bound him with unseen cords of steel.  The Frenchman’s eyes widened, but remained unblinking with a sort of glazed fixity.  The Master slid the paper toward him on the desk.

“Voila, monsieur!” said he.  “Will you sign this?”

A shivering tremor of the Frenchman’s muscles, as the ace sat there so strangely silent and motionless, betrayed the effort he was making to rise, to lift even a hand.  Beads of sweat began to ooze on his forehead; veins to knot there Still he remained seated, without power to speak or move.

“What?  You do not accept?” asked the Master, frowning as with puzzlement and displeasure.  “But, allons donc! this is strange indeed.  Almost as strange as the fact that your whole air-squadron, with the sole exception of your own plane, was dropped through the clouds.

“I have no wish unnecessarily to trouble your mind.  Let me state the facts.  Not one of those machines was precipitated into the sea.  No life was lost.  Ah, that astonishes you?”

The expression in the Frenchman’s face betrayed intense amazement, through his eyes alone.  The rest of his features remained almost immobile.  The Master smiling, continued: 

“The fleet was dropped to exactly one thousand feet above the sea.  There the inhibition on the engines was released and the engines began functioning again.  So no harm was done.  But not one of those machines can rise again higher than one thousand feet until I so choose.

“They are all hopelessly outdistanced, far down there below the cloud-floor.  Midges could catch a hawk as readily as they could overhaul this Eagle of the Sky.

“Nowhere within a radius of twenty-five miles can any of those planes rise to our level.  This is curious, but true.  In the same way, on much the same principle, though through a very different application of it, you cannot speak or move until I so desire.  All your voluntary muscles are completely, even though temporarily, paralyzed.  The involuntary ones, which carry on your vital processes, are untouched.