"In the name of _Shaka_! Yokohama harbor but a handful of miles away, and cut off utterly? It must be reached, I tell you! _It must be reached!_" His voice was low-pitched, but terrible in its intensity. "Drive to the Naval College and ask for twenty cadets--its swiftest runners--to be sent after you to Shimbashi. A locomotive can take them as far as the river. If there are no _sampan_, they can swim. Make demand in my authority. Not a minute is to be lost!" He put what he had been writing into the _aide's_ hand. "Read this in the carriage. It will serve as instruction." The _aide_ thrust the paper into his breast and vanished. The Admiral looked about him through stiffened, half-closed eyelids. Then, under the stress, it seemed, of a mighty shudder--the very soul of that overwhelming _certainty_ of the peril awaiting the red dawn on that bungalow roof above the Yokohama anchorage--the racial impassivity, the restraint and repression of emotion that long generations of ingrain habit have made second nature to the Japanese, suddenly crumbled. He struck his hand hard against the desk. "Has not Japan toiled and borne enough, that this shame must come to her?" His deep voice shook. "Your Excellency--Mr. Daunt--in all this land where heroism is hackneyed and sacrifice a fetish, there is no prince or coolie who, to turn aside this peril, would not give his body to the torture. Yet must we sit here helpless as _Darumas_! If man but had wings!" Daunt stiffened. He felt his heart beat to his temples. He started to his feet with an exclamation. "But man _has_ wings!" he cried. What of the long hours of toil and experiment, the gray mornings on Aoyama parade-ground when his Glider had carried him circling above the tree-tops? Could he do it? With no other word he darted to the hall. They heard his flying feet on the gravel and a quick command to a _betto_. The wind tossed back the word into the strained quiet. "Aoyama!" exclaimed the Ambassador, as the hoof-beats, lashed to an anguish of speed, died into silence. "His Glider!" A sudden hope flashed into the Admiral's face. "The gods of _Nippon_ aid him!" he said. CHAPTER L WHOM THE GODS DESTROY There was one whose guilty eyes were closed to the red danger so near. In the house in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley, under the green mosquito netting, Phil lay in a log-like slumber. The soft light of the paper _andon_ flowed over the gay wadded _f'ton_, the handsome besotted face with its mark of the satyr and, at one side, a little wooden pillow of black lacquer. There was no sound save the sweep of the wind outside and the heavy breathing of the unconscious man.