“Who is he?” Sandy persisted.
“The man who calls himself the Saver of Souls,” Bill said. “I didn't recognize his tactics until he came at me with that swerve, head-on.”
And Bill was aware that his voice was unsteady and trembling. He watched the dun biplane slip down in a power glide, then dropped the nose of the Lancer to follow it.
“And. this,” he said grimly to himself, “is the beginning of my holiday!”
V—“HE MUST BE SILENCED!”
MORDECAI MURPHY, the man who had led that little element of three dun-colored biplanes on their murderous flight over the Atlantic that morning, sank into an overstuffed leather chair in the lounging saloon of his hundred-and-eighty-foot, oil-burning yacht Haman, as it moved silently out into the Irish Sea from the Isle of Man.
Riding low in the water, the Haman was as spick and span and trim as the man who owned her. She was passing the tip of Langness, that narrow strip of land, jutting into the sea, which divides Castletown Bay from Derby Haven, the airport, before Mordecai Murphy came out of his reverie and spoke to the florid-faced Wetherby Duncan, who was his companion.
“I will tell you what happened now,” Mordecai Murphy said in his pleasant, cool way. “I'm sorry I was so abrupt when I came aboard. But I was in no mood to talk. I hadn't got over the amazing thing that happened to me today—the most amazing coincidence that has ever occurred to me. No fiction writer would dare to use it in a story.”
“You destroyed the Memphis?” Duncan asked in a low voice.
“We destroyed the Memphis.”
“Where are Chamberlain and Lorenzo?” Duncan asked.
“Dead,” Murphy said, and his eyes were as hard and brittle as two pieces of ice. “Stop asking me so many bloody questions and I'll tell you about things.
I'm trying to figure how, or why Barnes happened to be out there.”
“Bill Barnes?” Duncan asked.
“I told you something about my previous encounters with Bill Barnes, the American,” Murphy stated.
Duncan nodded.
“It is uncanny,” Murphy continued, half to himself. “I told you how I set a trap for Barnes over the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina?”
“Yes,” Duncan said.
“Did I tell you that the man who lured Barnes down there where I could get an unhampered shot at him was a stock broker in New York who told Barnes he knew a man down there who owned a block of Transatlantic Transport stock?” Murphy asked.
“No,” Duncan said, “you didn't tell me that.”
“That,” said Murphy, “is the why Transatlantic came to my attention. Barnes didn't get the stock because my agent shot himself the same day Barnes and I had our encounter.”
“And Barnes came out on top?” Duncan said, and immediately regretted having said it because of the deep color that suffused Murphy's face, and because of the way his eyes froze.
“But later on,” Murphy said, “Barnes got hold of a large block of it. Almost enough for control. I happen to know that he is having quite a task carrying it. That is one reason why I was willing to listen when you came to me with your proposition to make Transatlantic Transport look bad so that you could build up confidence in our own line, International Airways. I knew I would be killing two birds with one stone in destroying the Memphis.”
“You said Barnes was out there today?” Duncan said.
“I did.” There were two little creases between Murphy's worried eyes, and his mouth was a straight line across his strong jaw.
“We dove on the Memphis, riddling her with incendiary bullets,” he went on after a moment. “She was falling in flames when Barnes suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I don't think he could have received a call for help from the Memphis herself because I studied her layout so carefully that I am sure I got the radio apparatus and the operator on my first, dive. But there he was. He came down in a long power dive and circled above the Memphis as she struck the water. He was, probably, hoping to find some survivors.”
“Were there any?” Duncan asked.
“Not a one,” Murphy said, and there was no trace of regret in his expression. Rather, it was one of elation.
“And then?” Duncan said in his maddeningly cool way.
“He was too much for us,” Murphy said. “That man is without a doubt the greatest aerial fighter who ever lived. He is astonishing and he has the luck of——”
“His record doesn't sound as though there was any luck about it,” Duncan said. “How did it happen he didn't get you?”
“I don't know,” Murphy said frankly. “I learned my lesson in two encounters with him. No one can stand against him in the air. That is why I decided to leave him alone, at least in the air. There must be an element of luck about it.”
“He shot down Chamberlain and Lorenzo?”
“He tore them and their ships to bits with his 37mm. cannon,” Murphy said. He wet his dry lips with his tongue. “I was next.”
“You're here,” Duncan said, a smile flitting across his face.
“Only by the grace of God,” Murphy-said. “I admit that Barnes is my superior in the air now. But he won't always be. My day will come. ... He came at ire head-on, and I used a trick I learned from diving falcons. I have a room in my New York apartment where I train and watch them attack their prey. While I was getting ready for that combat with Barnes I learned that just before they strike their prey, after their dive with their wings wide and their talons spread, they swerve in to add force to their strike.
“I practiced the trick, keeping my ship out of line of fire of my opponent until just before we pass, when I swerve in to the left with my guns firing. At the last moment I zoom above him and then straighten out.”
“You used that trick on Barnes over North Carolina?” Duncan asked.
“Yes, and I used it again today.”
“Then what happened?”
“Barnes hung his ship on its props and took it upstairs,” Murphy said. “So far upstairs I couldn't follow him. I began to wallow at 35,000 feet and I didn't have any oxygen so I started for the Irish coast.”
“With Barnes following you?”
“Yes, but I lost him in a wall of fog just before I struck the coast. It was fortunate it was there or everything might have been different.”
“Yes,” Duncan said. “You would, probably, not be here. Barnes must have recognized that falcon trick and identified you. Either that or he didn't want to kill you because he wanted to know who you were. It might be either one. Does he know who you are?”
“He knows me only as the Saver of Souls,” Murphy said. “He has tried to find out who I am before. That is why I decided to leave him alone for a while. I was afraid he would learn.”
“What did you do with the fighter you were flying after you landed?” Duncan asked. His eyes were worried now. As the head of International Airways, a competitor of Transatlantic Transport in the flying of passengers and cargo from Europe to the Americas, he could not afford to be mixed up in any way with the villainous plot he had brought to Mordecai Murphy to execute.
Like a host of other men all over the world, he was indebted to Mordecai Murphy, the man who called himself the Saver of Souls. And like those other men whom Murphy had snatched out of jails and dungeons and the jaws of death, Wetherby Duncan had learned that Murphy did not do his saving for humanitarian reasons. Instead, he had learned. Murphy had saved him, as well as all the rest, to serve in his astounding mill of evil.