"With Fate. Now, listen!" The Master's tones became more animated.
A little of the inward fires had begun to burn through his
self-restraint. "Listen to me, and not a word till I'm done! You're
dryrotting for life, man. Dying for it, gasping for it, eating your
heart out for it! So am I. So are twenty-five or thirty men we know,
between us, in this city. That's all true, eh?"

"Some!"

"Yes! We wouldn't have to go outside New York to find at least
twenty-five or thirty in the same box we're in. All men who've been
through trench work, air work, life-and-death work on various fronts.
Men of independent means. Men to whom office work and club life
and all this petty stuff, here, is like dish-water after champagne!
Dare-devils, all of them, that wouldn't stop at the gates of Hell!"

"The gates of Hell?" demanded Bohannan, his brow wrinkling with glad
astonishment. "What d'you mean by that, now?"

"Just what I say! It's possible to gather together a kind of
unofficial, _sub rosa_, private little Foreign Legion of our own,
Bohannan--all battle-scarred men, all men with at least one decoration
and some with half a dozen. With that Legion, nothing would be
impossible!"

He warmed to his subject, leaned forward, fixed eager eyes on
his friend, laid a hand on Bohannan's knee. "We've all done
the conventional thing, long enough. Now we're going to do the
unconventional thing. We've been all through the known. Now we're
going after the unknown. And Hell is liable to be no name for it, I