Page:Flying Death.pdf/84

 throat astrain; his strong shoulders stiffened. I glanced, once, at his hands and saw them clenched white at his side.

"I have something more than my fists now," he continued. "I can strike them as and when I please; and they can do nothing whatever about it."

He shook, for a few seconds, like a man with a chill; suddenly he relaxed, smiled mirthlessly and looked calmly at us.

"Toss me a cigarette," he requested Pete, who picked one from a stand and handed it over. Pete struck a match, lit Bane's cigarette and one for himself. I, being a third, struck my own match.

"The airplane makes it so easy to do to them whatever one wants," Bane continued, in a voice calm from contempt. "So easy to have one's way with them.

"Here they are by millions all about me," he gestured in a circle beyond the hills, "millions of people busy heaping up accumulations of wealth and property, dearer to them than life itself, and which they can not possibly