So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved it and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level, and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck. He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung, who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of chocolate. Still munching he signalled:
"Hungry?"
He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of the upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil with his teeth, and crunched it greedily.
He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this, akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine. "Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not until she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he, von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman might be wreaked by the simple act of carrying off the boy, whom he had regarded until then as a mere bag of ballast; less useful, but certain to prove less troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might or might not carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his overalls with which to enforce his protest against being taken away.
Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic pistol. A deadly shot, he would have been capable of dealing with half a dozen Davises upon the solid ground. But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw himself steering with one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis sat astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued with an eighteen-and-sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber, loaded with the cheap little cordite cartridges, whose pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big man.
"What is this? You are sick?"
Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course between the compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an electric bulb, his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the dismal malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him. And in the sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on power once more, the broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as it ran eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered space of deck before him and showing him to the white-faced boy who had twisted round once more to look at him, as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.
"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"
Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:
"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is—Germany. You will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"
The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white face was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy visage, there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to other business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind might blow hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his course the true one, for the white headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his port beam. He told himself she was one of the Elbe Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for Hamburg Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made her look like a black water-beetle with golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea. Following the course of the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey against the pink-and-golden sunrise—the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless—marking the journey's end.