“But your pictures and mine have been very different. I am a scientist and you are a romantic.”
“You are the romantic. You have tried to force the world inside a theory, and it is too big for that. We humble people never attempt the impossible. You are a self-deceiver, you know.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because of your intellectual pride. It is only humility that sees clearly and knows its limitations.”
“Lord Clanroyden, for example, is humble?” There was a not unpleasant irony in his voice.
“Profoundly.”
“Yet he has challenged me. With his handful of amateurs he has challenged the might of Olifa. Was your Jack the Giant-killer humble?”
Janet laughed. “I think he was. Jack saw that the giants were far bigger than himself, but that, being over-grown, unnatural things, they were bound to be stupid and weak.”
“You think that a colossus is always weak?”
“He must be if he is outside the human scale. If he has no other flaw, he will have the weakness of pride.”
“You and your friends are very proud.”
“Oh, I hope not. If we are, we shall be punished for it. Sandy—Lord Clanroyden—is daring, but that is not because he thinks too much of himself, but because he believes that he has great allies.”
“Such as?”
The girl quoted: “Exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”
Castor laughed. “That is Wordsworth, isn’t it? It is a good answer, Lady Roylance, from your point of view. I am prepared of admit that Lord Clanroyden has allies—at any rate, he has friends. He need not be lonely.”
“You are lonely?” she asked with kind eyes.
“I have always been rather lonely… Perhaps… if I had met someone like you… long ago… I should not be so lonely to-day.”
It was Archie who brought the first big news. One evening he appeared at dinner with his left arm in a sling. “Not a wound,” he explained. “It was my own dashed silliness in getting too near the business end of a mule. I’ve been having a giddy time and I’m badly short of sleep. How are things going—? Pas si bete, as they say—except for Sandy. Old Sandy has gone stark mad. At present it’s a useful kind of madness, but the question is how long it will be till he goes clean off his rocker. He’s been doing pretty desperate things.”
Later he explained.
“Lossberg is making war according to the books. Sandy its down and thinks out very carefully what the books direct and then does the exact opposite. He is trying to draw the enemy deep into the country, and for that purpose he is making a feature of Fort Castor. We’ve a pretty useful intelligence service, and the best part of it is that section which we put at Lossberg’s disposal. You see, having the country on our side, we have a lot of enthusiastic volunteers. Lossberg picks up some Indian or half-starved mestizo who is easily frightened into telling what he knows. The poor devil is obviously speaking the truth, for he is too cared and stupid to lie. Only what he says has been carefully pumped into him by our little lot. The result is that Lossberg has got it into his head that Fort Castor is our big base, and is stretching his claws round it as carefully as a cat stalking a mouse. He has moved up the better part of a division. But there’s nothing in Fort Castor except mounted patrols. We put up a beautiful camouflage and let Lossberg’s flying men have a discreet look at it once in a while. But when he takes the place after some trouble he won’t find a tin of bully beef in it.”
Somebody asked where Sandy was.
“He was in Magdalena yesterday. We are organised in two armies. Escrick, with the Army of the North, is now divided between Loa and Magdalena, and he has a covered line of communications between them through the hills behind, just like what Stonewall Jackson had in the Shenandoah valley. The enemy has spotted neither. Peters, with the Army of the South, is playing the same game. Lossberg thinks he is based on the Indian pueblas in the Tierra Caliente from which he can threaten the Mines, and consequently he has a division strung out from the San Tome to the Universum and is building a sort of Great Wall of China in the shape of blockhouses. Peters just does enough to keep the Mines lively, but he isn’t worrying about them. All he wants is to get Lossberg rattled.”
Archie pointed to the south-east corner of the big map. “There’s a spot there called Pacheco, just under the hills. That’s Peters’ real base. He’s got some nice country west of that for his scallywags to operate in. There should be news from that quarter pretty soon.”
“Base?” he said in reply to a question of Castor’s. “Why, we haven’t any proper base, and we haven’t any communications to cut. We’re the most lightly equipped force in the world, for we don’t go in for high living. A bit of charqui and a bag of meal will last one of our fellows for a week. Also we know all the wells and water-holes, and Lossberg doesn’t. Water is going to give him a lot of trouble.”
“Has he no one who knows the country?” Janet asked.
“Not as we do. He’ll pick up somebody later, for we’re bound to have a traitor or two in our camp. Also there are your gunmen, Excellency. One or two of them have been a bit around. But he hasn’t got anybody yet, and has gone poking about, trusting to bad maps, and the lies we manage to feed him.”
“What about his Air Force?”
Bobby Latimer answered. “So far we’ve managed to keep it in order. We’ve nothing on them in the way of flying, for they’re nicely trained, but they can’t just fight in our way. And they haven’t any machines as good as our new Gladas. If this were a regular war, they’d be mighty good at contact work and bombing expeditions. You never saw prettier squadron flying. But we’ve no communications to bomb, and at present they’re wasting their efforts every night on Fort Castor.”
“But do none of their planes get abroad and discover your real whereabouts? Magdalena, for example—or Loa?”
“So far we haven’t let them. We can beat anything they’ve got in pace and we seem to have more appetite for a scrap. There’s been one or two very pretty dog-fights. Besides, it don’t signify if they spot Magdalena or Loa or even Pacheco. We could shift somewhere else in a couple of hours.”
“But you have a base.” It was Castor who spoke. “Where we are sitting now is your base. If they take this, you are lost. If they even bomb it, you are deeply embarrassed.”
“I think that’s right,” said Latimer. “Therefore it’s up to us to let no enemy planes north of Loa. So far they haven’t shown any inclination in this direction. They’re too much occupied with General Peters.”
“Yet at any moment they may discover it?”
“There’s no reason in the nature of things why they shouldn’t,” said Archie. “But it’s one thing for a chance plane to spot us and another thing for Lossberg to exploit his knowledge.”
Three days later Archie returned in high spirits. He had two pieces of news. The first was that Bobby Latimer had brought down an enemy plane north of Loa. The pilot and observer were alive, and the plane was not too badly damaged, so they had added one to their stock of aircraft—a Seaforth monoplane, in the mechanism of which he discoursed at length. Happily they had the spares for it. He welcomed this new sign of enterprise on the part of Olifa as likely to relieve the tedium of his job. When Janet observed that, if one enemy could get as far as Loa, a second might get farther, Archie was reassuring.
“The way I look at it is this. They’ve spotted Loa—they were bound to hear of it from spies and such-like. But they’re so darned unenterprising that only one of their planes gets through.