Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence.
There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke.

"Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of the
altimeter. "Some situation! Two men dead and others injured. Engines
crippled, propellers the same, and two floats so damaged we couldn't
stay on the surface if we came down. Well, by God!"

Leclair looked very grim.

"I regret only," said he in broken English, "that the stowaway escaped
us. Ah, _la belle exécution_, if we had him now!"

The Master, at the starboard window, kept silence. No one sat at the
wheel. Of what use could it have been? The Master was looking far
to eastward, now with the naked eye, now sweeping the prospect with
binoculars. He was studying the African coast, clearly in sight as a
long, whitish line of sand with a whiter collar of foamy surf, fifteen
miles away.

A few gulls had begun to show--strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked
and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with
full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was
beginning to grow intense, for no longer was _Nissr_ making a gale
that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the
tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressed
them all.

Through the shimmering, quivering air, an arid pallor extended up the
eastern sky; a pale, milky illumination, dull-white over the desert,
that told of the furnace into which _Nissr_ was drifting--if indeed
she could survive till she reached land. The glasses showed tawny
reaches of sand, back a little from the coast; and beyond these, low
hills, or rather rolling dunes, lay empurpled by vibrant heat-hazes.

"It won't be much like navigating over that Hell-spot, three or four
miles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed.
The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure had
raveled his nerve.

No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently
squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of
flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked
face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's
shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was
her suffering.

"Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently.
Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singular
figure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbows
on the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated with
croton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrol
from the final explosion had spattered him.

His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his red
crop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone,
as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, the
savage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressing
him. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition of
the Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun.

"What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's damned bad, according to my way
of thinking."

"What you think and what you say won't have any weight with this
problem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we make
land, we make it, that's all, sir." He relapsed into silence. Leclair
muttered, in Arabic--his words audible only to himself--an ancient
Islamic proverb: "Allah knows best, and time will show!" Then, after a
moment's pause, the single word: "Kismet!"

Silence again, in which the Master's brain reviewed the stirring
incidents of the past hour and a half--how the stowaway had evaded
Dr. Lombardo's vigilance and (thoroughly familiar with every detail
of _Nissr_) had succeeded in making his way to the aft port fuel-tank,
from which he had probably drained petrol through a pet-cock and
thereafter set it afire; how the miscreant had then scrambled up the
aft companion-ladder, to shoot down the Master himself; and how only
a horrible, nightmare fight against the flames had saved even this
shattered wreck of the air-liner.

It had all been Kloof's fault, of course, and Lombardo's. Those
two had permitted this disaster to befall, and--yes, they should be
punished, later. But how? The Master's mind attacked this problem.
Each of the four Legionaries in the pilot-house was busy with his own
thoughts.

On and on toward the approaching shores of Africa drifted the wounded
Eagle of the Sky, making no headway save such as the west wind
gave her. Steadily the needle of the altimeter kept falling. The
high-pitched drone of the helicopters told that the crippled engines
were doing their best; but even that best was not quite enough.

Like a tired creature of the air, the liner lagged, she sank. Before
half the distance had been covered to that gleaming beach, hardly six
hundred feet lay between the lower gallery of _Nissr_ and the long,
white-toothed waves that, slavering, hungered for her gigantic body
and the despairing crew she bore.

Suddenly the Master spoke into the engine-room telephone.

"Can you do any better?" exclaimed the chief. "This is not enough!"

"We're doing our best, sir," came the voice of Frazier, now in charge.

"If you can possibly strain a point, in some way, and wring a little
more power out of the remaining engines--"

"We're straining them beyond the limit now, sir."

The Master fell silent, pondering. His eyes sought the dropping
needle. Then the light of decision filled his eyes. A smile came to
his face, where the deep gash made by the splinter of glass had been
patched up with collodion and cotton. He plugged in on another line,
by the touch of a button.

"Simonds! Is that you?"

"Yes, sir," answered the quartermaster, in charge of all the stores.

"Have you jettisoned everything?"

"All we can spare, sir. All but the absolute minimum of food and
water."

"Overboard with them all!"

"But, sir--"

"And drop the body of Auchincloss, too. This is no time for
sentiment!"

"But--"

"My order, sir!"

Five minutes later, cases, boxes, bales, water-tanks, began spinning
from open ports and down through the trap-door in the lower gallery.
Then followed the seared corpse of Auchincloss, a good man who had
died in harness, fighting to the end. Those to whom the duty was
assigned of giving his metal-weighted body sea burial turned away
their eyes, so that they might not see that final plunge. But
the sound of the body striking the waves rocketed up to them with
sickening distinctness.

Lightened a little, _Nissr_ seemed to rally for a few minutes. The
altimeter needle ceased its drop, trembled and even rose _.275_
degrees.

"God! If we only had an ounce more power!" burst out the major, his
mouth mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Master
remained quite impassive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened,
feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on,
on drifted _Nissr_, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlight
of approaching evening in every detail revealing--as it slanted in,
almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the Atlantic--the
ravages wrought by flame.

Bohannan could not long be silent. The exuberance of his nature burst
forth with a half-defiant:

"If _I_ were in charge, which I'm not, I'd stop those damned
helicopters, let her down, turn what power we've got into the
remaining propellers, and taxi ashore!"

"And probably sink, or break up in the surf, on the beach, there!"
curtly rejoined the Master. "Ah! _What_?"

His binoculars checked their sweep along the coast, which in its
absolute barrenness looked a place of death for whatever might have
life there.

"You see something, _mon capitaine?_" asked Leclair, blowing smoke
from his cigarette. "Allow me also to look! Where is it?"

"Just to north of that gash--that wady, or gully, making down to the
beach. You see it, eh?"

Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes
of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise
of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grass
could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory
nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat,
by the beatings of surf eternal.

Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of
sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled
with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhàh_,
or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror of
desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale
purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had
witnessed from the windows of _Niss'rosh_, the night his great plan
had come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed
eight years!

Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a
brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague
edge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman
could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene--a
land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these
coasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clans
of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents. Africa, once more seen
under such unexpected circumstances, roused his blood as he peered at
the crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakedness
under the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.

All at once his glass stopped its sweep.

"Smoke, my Captain!" he exclaimed. "See, it curls aloft like a lady's
ringlet. And--beyond the wady--"

"Ah, you see them, too?"

The major's glass, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was now
fixed on the indicated spot, as was "Captain Alden's."

"I see them," the Master answered. "And the green flag--the flag of
the Prophet--"

"The flag, _oui, mon capitaine!_ There are many men, but--"

"But what, Lieutenant?"

"Ah, do you not see? No horses. No camels. That means their oasis is
not far. That means they are not traveling. This is no nomadic moving
of the Ahl Bayt. No, no, my Captain. It is--"

"Well, what?"

"A war-party. What you in your language call the--the reception
committee, _n'est-ce pas?_ Ah, yes, the reception committee."

"And the guests?" demanded the major.

"The guests are all the members of the Flying Legion!" answered the
Frenchman, with another draw at his indispensable cigarette.




CHAPTER XX


THE WAITING MENACE

"Ah, sure now, but that's fine!" exclaimed the major with delight, his
eyes beginning to sparkle in anticipation. "The best of news! A little
action, eh? I ask nothing better. All I ask is that we live to reach
the committee--live to be properly killed! It's this dying-alive that
kills _me_! Faith, it tears the nerves clean out of my body!"

"That is a true Arab idea, Major," smiled Leclair. "To this extent you
are brother to the Bedouin. They call a man _fatis_, as a reproach,
who dies any other way than fighting. May you never--may none of
us--ever suffer the disgrace of being _fatis_!"

"There's not much danger of that!" put in the Master. "That's a big
war-party, and we're drifting ashore almost exactly where they're
waiting. From the appearance of the group, they look like Beni Harb
people--'Sons of Fighting' you know--though I didn't expect we'd sight
any of that breed so far to westward."

"Beni Harb, eh?" echoed the Frenchman, his face going grim. "Ah,
_mes amis_, it is with pleasure I see that race, again!" He sighted
carefully through his glass, as _Nissr_ sagged on and on, ever closer
to the waves, ever nearer the hard, sun-roasted shores of Africa.
"Yes, those are Beni Harb men. _Dieu_! May it be Sheik Abd el Rahman's
tribe! May I have strength to repay the debt I owe them!"

"What debt, Lieutenant?" asked the chief.

Leclair shrugged his shoulders.

"A personal matter, my Captain! A personal debt I owe them--with
interest!"

"You will have nearly a score and a half of good fighting men to help
you settle your account," smiled the Master. Then, to Bohannan: "It
looks now, Major, as if you'd have a chance to try your sovereign
remedy."

"Faith! Machine-guns, eh?"

"Yes, provided we get near enough to use them."

"No vibrations this time, eh?" demanded the Celt, a bit of
good-humored malice in his voice. "Vibrations are all very well in
their way, sir, but when it comes to a man-to-man fight--"

"It's not that, Major," the chief interrupted. "We haven't the
available power, now, for high-tension current. So we must fall back
on lesser means.

"You, sir, and Lieutenant Leclair, get the six gun-crews together at
their stations. When we drift in range, give the Beni Harb a few trays
of blanks. That may scatter them without any further trouble. We want
peace, but if it's got to be war, very well. If they show real fight,
rake them hard!"

"They will show fight, surely enough, mon capitaine," put in Leclair,
as he and the major made their way to the oddly tiptilted door leading
back into the main corridor. "I know these folk. No blank cartridges
will scatter that breed. Even the Turks are afraid of them. They have
a proverb: 'Feed the Beni Harb, and they will fire at Allah!' That
says it all.

"Mohammed laid a special curse on them. I imagine your orderly, Rrisa,
will have something to say when he learns that we have Beni Harb as
opponents. Now, sir, we shall make all haste to get the machine-guns
into action!"

Major Bohannan laughed with more enjoyment than he had shown since
_Nissr_ had left America. They both saluted and withdrew. When the
door was closed again, a little silence fell in the pilot-house, the
floor of which had now assumed an angle of nearly thirty degrees.
The droning of the helicopters, the drift of the sickly white smoke
that--rising from _Nissr's_ stern--wafted down-wind with her, the
drunken angle of her position all gave evidence of the serious
position in which the Flying Legion now found itself. Suddenly the
Master spoke. His dismissal of Bohannan and Leclair had given him the
opportunity he wanted.

"Captain Alden," said he, bruskly, with the unwillingness of
a determined man forced to reverse a fixed decision. "I have
reconsidered my dictum regarding you."

"Indeed, sir?" asked the woman, from where she stood leaning against
the sill of the slanted window. "You mean, sir, I am to stay with the
Legion, till the end?"

"Yes. Your service in having shot down the stowaway renders it
imperative that I show you some human recognition. You gained
admission to this force by deception, and you broke parole and escaped
from the stateroom where I had imprisoned you. But, as you have
explained to me, you heard the explosion, you heard the outcry of
pursuit, and you acted for my welfare.

"I can weigh relative values. I grant your request. The score is wiped
clean. You shall remain, on one condition."

"And what is that, sir?" asked "Captain Alden," with a voice of
infinite relief.

"That you still maintain the masculine disguise. The presence of a
woman, as such, in this Legion, would be a disturbing factor. You
accept my terms?"

"Certainly! May I ask one other favor?"

"What favor?"

"Spare Kloof and Lombardo!"

"Impossible!"

"I know their guilt, sir. Through their carelessness in not having
discovered the stowaway and in having let him escape, the Legion came
near sudden death. I know _Nissr_ is a wreck, because of them. Still,
we need men, and those two are good fighters. Above all, we need
Lombardo, the doctor I ask you to spare them at least their lives!"

"That is the woman's heart in you speaking, now," the chief answered,
coldly. His eyes were far ahead, where the war-party was beginning
to debouch on the white sands along the shore--full three hundred
fighting-men, or more, well armed, as the tiny sparkles of sunlight
flicking from weapons proved. As _Nissr_ drew in to land, the Beni
Harb grew visible to the naked eye, like a swarm of ants on the desert
rim.

"The woman's heart," repeated the Master. "That is your only fault and
weakness, that you are a woman and that you forgive."

"You grant my request?"

"No, Captain. Nor can I even discuss it. Those two men have cut
themselves off from the Legion and signed their own death warrant.
The sentence I have decided on, must stand. Do not speak of this to me
again, madam! Now, kindly withdraw."

"Yes, sir!" And Alden, saluting, approached the door.

"One moment! Send Leclair back to me. Inform Ferrara that he is to
command the second gun-crew."

"Yes, sir!" And the woman was gone.

Leclair appeared, some moments later. He suspected nothing of the
subterfuge whereby the Master had obtained a few minutes' conversation
alone with "Captain Alden."

"You sent for me, sir?" asked the Frenchman.

"I did. I have some questions to ask you. Others can handle the guns,
but you have special knowledge of great importance to me. And first,
as an expert ace, what are our chances of making that shore, sir, now
probably five miles off? In a crisis, I always want to ask an expert's
opinion."

Leclair peered from under knit brows at the altimeter needle and the
inclinometer. He leaned from the pilot-house window and looked down at
the waves, now hardly a hundred feet below, their foaming hiss quite
audible. From those waves, red light reflected as the sun sank,
illuminated the Frenchman's lean, brown features and flung up wavering
patches of illumination against the pilot-house ceiling of burnished
metal, through the tilted windows that sheerly overhung the water.

"_Eh bien_--" murmured Leclair, noncommittally.

"Well, can we make it, sir?"

The ace inspected the vacuum-gauges, the helicopter tachometers, and
shrugged his shoulders.

"'_Fais tout, toi-même, et Dieu t'aidera_,'" he quoted the cynical old
French proverb. "If nothing gives way, there is a chance."

"If we settle into the sea, do you think that with our damaged floats
we can drive ashore without breaking up?"

"I do not, my Captain. There is a heavy sea running, and the surf is
bad on the beach. This Rio de Oro coast is cruel. Have you our exact
position?"

"Almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, half-way between Cape Bojador
to north of us, and Cape Blanco, to south."

"Yes, I understand. That brings us to the Tarmanant region of the
Sahara. Fate could not have chosen worse for us. But, _c'est la
guerre_. All I regret, however, is that in a crippled condition we
have to face a war-party of the Beni Harb. Were we intact, and a match
for them, how gladly would I welcome battle with that scum of Islam!
Ah, the _canaille_!"




CHAPTER XXI


SHIPWRECK AND WAR

"You call them dogs, eh?" asked the chief. "And why?"

"What else are such apostate fanatics? People who live by robbery and
plunder--people who, if they find no gold in your money-belt, will rip
your stomach open to see if you've swallowed it! People who boast
of being _harami_ (highwaymen), and who respect the _jallah_
(slave-driver)!

"People who practice the barbaric _thar_, or blood-feud! People who
torture their victims by cutting off the ends of their fingers before
beheading or crucifying them! People who glory in murdering the
'idolators of Feringistan,' as they call us white men! Let me advise
you now, my Captain, when dealing with these people or fighting them,
never use your last shot on them. Always keep a mercy-bullet in your
gun!"

"A mercy-bullet?"

"For yourself!"

The Master pondered a moment or two, as _Nissr_ drifted on toward the
now densely massed Arabs on the beach, then he said:

"You seem to know these folk well."

"Only too well!"

The Master's next words were in the language of the desert:

"_Hadratak tet kal'm Arabi?_" (You speak Arabic?)

"_Na'am et kal'm!_" affirmed the lieutenant, smiling. And in the same
tongue he continued, with fluent ease: "Indeed I do, _Effendi_. Yes,
yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the
headwaters of the Niger.

"Five years I spent among the Arabs, doing air-work, surveying the
Sahara, locating oases, mapping what until then were absolutely
unknown stretches of territory. I did a bit of bombing, too, in the
campaign against Sheik Abd el Rahman, in 1913."

"Yes, so I have heard. You almost lost your life, that time?"

"Only by the thickness of a _semmah_ seed did I preserve it," answered
the Frenchman. "My mechanician, Lebon, and I--we fell among them on
account of engine trouble, near the oasis of Adrar, not far from here.
We had no machine-gun--nothing but revolvers. We stood them off for
seven hours, before they rushed us. They captured us only because our
last cartridges were gone."

"You did not save the mercy-bullet that time, eh?"

"I did not, _Effendi._ I did not know them then as I do now. They
knocked us both senseless, and then began hacking our machine to
pieces with their huge _balas_ (yataghans). They thought our plane was
some gigantic bird.

"Superstition festers in their very bones! The giant bird, they
believed, would ruin their date crops; and, besides, they thirsted for
the blood of the Franks. As a matter of fact, my Captain, these people
do sometimes drink a little of the blood of a slaughtered enemy."

"Impossible!"

"True, I tell you! They destroyed our plane with fire and sword,
reviled us as pigs and brothers of pigs, and named poor Lebon 'kalb
ibn kalb,' or 'dog and son of a dog.' Then they separated into two
bands. One band departed toward Wady Tawarik, taking Lebon. They
informed me that on the morrow they would crucify him on a cross of
palm-wood, head downward."

"And they executed Lebon?"

Leclair shrugged his shoulders.

"I suppose so," he answered with great bitterness. "I have never
seen or heard of him since. As for me, they reserved me for some
festivities at Makam Jibrail. During the next night, a column of
Spanish troops from Rio de Oro rushed their camp, killed sixty or
seventy of the brown demons, and rescued me. Since then I have lusted
revenge on the Beni Harb!"

"No wonder," put in the chief, once more looking at the beach, where
now the war-party was plainly visible to the naked eye in some detail.
The waving of their arms could be distinguished; and plainly glittered
the blood-crimson sunset light on rifle-barrels, swords, and javelins.
The Master loosened his revolver in its holster. "About twenty minutes
from now, at this rate," he added, "some of the Beni Harb will have
reason to remember you."

"Yes, and may Jehannum take them all!" exclaimed the Frenchman,
passionately. His eyes glowered with hate as he peered across the
narrowing strip of waves and surf. "Jehannum, where every time their
skins are burned off, as the Koran says, new ones will grow to be
burned off again! Where 'they shall have garments of fire fitted upon
them and boiling water poured upon their heads, and they shall be
beaten with maces of iron--"

"And their tormentors shall say unto them: 'Taste ye the pain of
burning!'" the Master concluded the familiar quotation with a
smile. "Waste no time in wishing the Beni Harb future pain, my dear
Lieutenant. Jehannum may indeed reserve the fruit of the tree Al
Zakkum, for these dogs, but our work is to give them a foretaste of
it, today. Kismet seems to have willed it that you and the Beni Harb
shall meet again. Is it not a fortunate circumstance, for you?"

"Fortunate, yes," the Frenchman answered, his eyes glowing as they
estimated the strength of the war-party, now densely massed along the
shining sands, "But, thank God, there are no women in this party! That
would mean that one of us would have to kill a woman--for God help
a woman of Feringistan caught by these _jinnee_, these devils of the
waste!"

Silence again. Both men studied the Beni Harb. The Frenchman judged,
reverting to his native tongue: "Certainly more than three hundred
of these 'abusers of the salt,' my Captain. And we are hardly thirty.
Even if we reach land, we must soon sink to earth. Without food,
water, anything--_ce n'est pas gai, hein?_"

"No, it is not gay," the chief answered. "But with machine-guns--"

"Machine-guns cannot fight against the African sun, against famine,
thirst, delirium, madness. Well--'blessed be certainty,' as the Arabs
say."

"You mean death?"

"Yes, I mean death. We always have that in our grasp, at any
rate--after having taken full toll of these devils. I should not
mind, so much, defeat at the hands of the nobler breed of the Arabian
Peninsula. There, in the _Ruba el Khali_[1] itself, I know a chivalric
race dwells that any soldier might be proud to fight or to rule over.
But these Shiah heretic swine--ah, see now, they are taking cover
already? They will not stand and fight, like men!"

[Footnote 1: _Ruba el Khali_ (The Empty Abodes), a name applied by
the Arabs to the Peninsula, especially the vast inner region never
penetrated by any white man.]

Scornfully he flung a hand at the Beni Harb. The fringes of the
tribe were trickling up the sands, backward, away, toward the line
of purple-hazed dunes that lined the coast. More and more of the
war-party followed. Gradually all passed up the wady, over the dunes
and vanished.

"They are going to ambush us, my Captain," said Leclair. "'In rice,
strength; in the Beni Harb, manhood!'"

Nearer the land, ever sagging down but still afloat--though now at
times some of the heavier surges broke in foam over the rail of the
lower gallery--the Eagle of the Sky drifted on, on. Hardly a half-mile
now lay between air-liner and shore. Suddenly the Master began to
speak:

"Listen, Lieutenant! Events are at a crisis, now. I will speak very
plainly. You know the Arabs, good and bad. You know Islam, and all
that the Mohammedan world is. You know there are more than 230,000,000
people of this faith, scattered from Canton to Sierra Leone, and
from Cape Town to Tobolsk, all over Turkey, Africa, and Arabia--an
enormous, fanatic, fighting race! Probably, if trained, the finest
fighting-men in the world, for they fear neither pain nor' death. They
welcome both, if their hearts are enlisted!"

"Yes, yes, I know! Their Hell yawns for cowards; their Paradise opens
to receive the brave! Death is as a bride to the Moslem!"

"Fanatics all, Lieutenant! Only a few white men have ever reached
Mecca and returned. Bartema, Wild, and Joseph Pitt succeeded, and so
did Hurgronje, Courtelmont, Burton, and Burckhardt--though, the Arabs
admit only the two last.

"But how many hundreds have been beheaded or crucified? No pilgrimage
ever takes place without a few such victims. A race of this type is a
potential world-power of incalculable magnitude. Men who will die for
Islam and for their master without a quiver--"

"My Captain! What do you mean?"

The lieutenant's eyes had begun to fill with flame. His hand tightened
to a fist.

"_Mon Dieu_, what do you mean? Can it be possible you dream of ruling
the races of Islam?"

Something whined overhead, from the beach now only about a
quarter-mile distant. Then a shot from behind the dunes cracked out
across the crumbling, hissing surf.

"Ah," laughed Leclair, "the ball has opened, eh? Well this is now no
time for talk, for empty words. I think I understand you, my Captain;
and to the death I stand at your right hand!"

Their palms met and clasped, a moment, in the firm grip of a compact
between two strong men, unafraid. Then each drew his pistol, crouching
there at the windows of the pilot-house.

"Hear how that bullet sang?" questioned the Frenchman. "It was
notched--a notched slug, you understand. That is a familiar trick with
these dog-people of the Beni Harb. Sometimes, if they have poison,
they dip the notched slug in that too. And, ah, what a wound one