Page:Flying Death.pdf/140

 my idea that he had, himself, no interest in her conversion. He referred tome. "Would you like to see these?"

"No," I said. "I know that such things are."

"Then you are exceedingly stupid," Cawder caught me up sharply, "to know nothing more." He struck, suddenly, the side of his chair. "Man alive and flying! If half a pint of nitro tossed from the tail of a motor-car can supercede law and impose obedience, what do you figure to be the power of a few airplanes with ton bombs of TNT? Don't you see that we can do whatever we like? We have them absolutely at our mercy! How they lie down and cringe and crawl and dare scarcely speak before the threat of half a pint of nitro tossed from a motor-car! What will they do, or what will they refuse to do, if we order it and back our orders by a few ton bombs of TNT dropped on them out of the sky?"

"They?" Helen Lacey cried. "They? who do you mean? They?"

Cawder returned to her. "They?" he repeated. "The people who imagine they rule.