umination on either hand, with still or
moving ships' lights on the breast of the waters--Bohannan murmured:

"Even now, as your partner in this enterprise--"

"My lieutenant," corrected the Master.

"As second in command," amended Bohannan, irritably, "I'm not wholly
convinced this is the correct procedure." He spoke in low tones,
covered by the purring exhaust of the launch and by the hiss of
swiftly cloven waters. "It looks like unnecessary complication, to me,
and avoidable danger."

"It is neither," answered the man at the wheel. "What would you have
done? What better plan could you have proposed?"

"You could have built your own flyer, couldn't you? Since money's no
object to you, and you don't even know, accurately, how much you've
got--nobody can keep track of figures like those--why risk legal
interference and international complications at the start, by--"

"To build the kind of flyer we need would have taken six or seven
months. Not all my money could have produced it, sooner. And absolute
ennui can't wait half a year. I'd have gone wholly stale, and so would
you, and all of them. We'd have lost them.

"Again, news of any such operations would have got out. My plans would
possibly have been checkmated. In the third place, what you propose
would have been tame sport, indeed, as a beginning! Three excellent
reasons, my dear Major, why this is positively the only way."

"Perhaps. But there's always the chance of failure, now. The guards--"

"After your own experience, when that capsule burst in the laboratory,
you talk to me about guards?"

"Suppose one escapes?"

The Master only smiled grimly, and sighted his course up the dark
river.

"And the alarm is sure to be given, in no time. Why didn't you just
buy the thing outright?"

"It's not for sale, at any price."

"Still--men can't run off with three and a half million dollars' worth
of property and with provisions and equipment like that, all ready for
a trial trip, without raising Hell. There'll be pursuit--"

"What with, my dear Bohannan?"

"That's a foolish statement of mine, the last one, I admit," answered
the major, as his companion swung the launch a little toward the
Jersey shore. "Of course nothing can overhaul us, once we're away.
But you know my type of mind weighs every possibility, pro and con.
Wireless can fling out a fan of swift aerial police ahead of us from
Europe."

"How near can anything get to us?"

"I know it all lo