Page:Flying Death.pdf/66

 I was sure that this man flew, not only because he was so eminently fit for it, but because his bearing, besides being aggressive, was proprietory. He owned this place and those airplanes; he wanted to be, also, proprietor of the girl.

For all his self-assertion, for all his pose of indolence, he was under a slight tension. He had just finished a long flight, I suspected. The tension was of that sort. Moreover, I noticed now that his linen was crumpled though his coat was faultless. He had cast off a leather jacket, I guessed, and hurriedly donned this to drive from the other side of the lake to meet us.

He must have been flying one of the blue monoplanes upon the opposite beach; and he, having had a part in the events of this morning, never would have played a petty rôle. He had not been the pilot who merely had risen to put another aboard the effigy plane; nor had he been the pilot transferred from plane to plane to land the vehicle of the automaton. He had been the man, I believed, who had