miles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed.
The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure had
raveled his nerve.

No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently
squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of
flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked
face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's
shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was
her suffering.

"Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently.
Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singular
figure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbows
on the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated with
croton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrol
from the final explosion had spattered him.

His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his red
crop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone,
as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, the
savage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressing
him. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition of
the Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun.

"What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's damned bad, according to my way
of thinking."

"What you think and what you say won't have any weight with this
problem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we make