The Flying Legion | Page 2

in gold thread. Aviator's gauntlets draped the staff of the banner.
Along the eastern side of this eyrie a broad divan invited one to rest. Over it were
suspended Austrian and Bulgarian captures--a lance with a blood-stiffened pennant, a
cuirass, entrenching tools, a steel helmet with an eloquent bullet-hole through the crown.
Some few framed portraits of noted "aces" hung here and elsewhere, with two or three
photographs of battle-planes. Three of the portraits were framed in symbolic black. Part
of a smashed Taube propeller hung near.
As for the western side of Niss'rosh, this space between the two broad windows that
looked out over the light-spangled city, the Hudson and the Palisades, was occupied by a
magnificent Mercator's Projection of the world. This projection was heavily annotated
with scores of comments penciled by a firm, virile hand. Lesser spaces were occupied by
maps of the campaigns in Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. One map, larger than any
save the Mercator, showed the Arabian Peninsula. A bold question-mark had been
impatiently flung into the great, blank stretch of the interior; a question-mark eager,
impatient, challenging.
It was at this map that the master of Niss'rosh, the eagle's nest, was peering as the curtain
rises on our story. He was half reclining in a big, Chinese bamboo chair, with an attitude
of utter and disheartening boredom. His crossed legs were stretched out, one heel digging
into the soft pile of the Tabreez rug. Muscular arms folded in an idleness that irked them
with aching weariness, he sat there, brooding, motionless.
Everything about the man spelled energy at bay, forces rusting, ennui past telling. But
force still dominated. Force showed in the close-cropped, black hair and the small ears set
close to the head; in the corded throat and heavy jaws; in the well-muscled shoulders,
sinewed hands, powerful legs. This man was forty-one years old, and looked thirty-five.
Lines of chest and waist were those of the athlete. Still, suspicions of fat, of unwonted
softness, had begun to invade those lines. Here was a splendid body, here was a
dominating mind in process of going stale.
The face of the man was a mask of weariness of the soul, which kills so vastly more
efficiently than weariness of the body. You could see that weariness in the tired frown of
the black brows, the narrowing of the dark eyes, the downward tug of the lips. Wrinkles
of stagnation had began to creep into forehead and cheeks--wrinkles that no amount of
gymnasium, of club life, of careful shaving, of strict hygiene could banish.
Through the west windows the slowly changing hues of gray, of mulberry, and dull
rose-pink blurred in the sky, cast softened lights upon those wrinkles, but could not hide

them. They revealed sad emptiness of purpose. This man was tired unto death, if ever
man were tired.
He yawned, sighed deeply, stretched out his hand and took up a bit of a model
mechanism from the table, where it had lain with other fragments of apparatus. For a
moment he peered at it; then he tossed it back again, and yawned a second time.
"Business!" he growled. "'Swapped my reputation for a song,' eh? Where's my
commission, now?"
He got up, clasped his hands behind him, and walked a few times up and down the heavy
rug, his footfalls silent.
"The business could have gone on without me!" he added, bitterly. "And, after all, what's
any business, compared to life?"
He yawned again, stretched up his arms, groaned and laughed with mockery:
"A little more money, maybe, when I don't know what to do with what I've got already!
A few more figures on a checkbook--and the heart dying in me!"
Then he relapsed into silence. Head down, hands thrust deep in pockets, he paced like a
captured animal in bars. The bitterness of his spirit was wormwood. What meant, to him,
the interests and pleasures of other men? Profit and loss, alcohol, tobacco, women--all
alike bore him no message. Clubs, athletics, gambling--he grumbled something savage as
his thoughts turned to such trivialities. And into his aquiline face came something the
look of an eagle, trapped, there in that eagle's nest of his.
Suddenly the Master of Niss'rosh came to a decision. He returned, clapped his hands
thrice, sharply, and waited. Almost at once a door opened at the southeast corner of the
room--where the observatory connected with the stairway leading down to the Master's
apartment on the top floor of the building--and a vague figure of a man appeared.
The light was steadily fading, so that this man could by no means be clearly distinguished.
But one could see that he wore clothing quite as conventional as his master's. Still, no
more than the Master did he appear one of