The judge looked at the colonel with raised eyebrows when he heard this strange decision, but the captain, forgetting his position for a moment, blurted out:-- "Tribute indeed? When did the King of England pay tribute for his mails to be carried across the Hamadian desert?" The air-king eyed the speaker with apparent amazement, mingled with a touch of scorn and pity, then quietly observed:-- "That is the very point, Captain. There has been far too much laxity in this respect in the past. The liberties of the small nations to make their own laws, and possess their own lands in peace, have been greatly endangered of late. It is mere brigandage for a great power to over-ride the native interests of small communities. But from to-day this brigandage must cease, at any rate over the territories where I rule." The captain could find no reply to this sally of the desert king’s, and, while a smile played about the corners of his mouth, he looked beyond this robber chief, in his gaudy trappings, to where the _Scorpion_ lay squatting like an ugly toad upon the sands. At length the monarch resumed his cross-examination with these words: "Come, Captain, will you pay tribute for the transit of mails across my territory, or will you not?" "I will not!" replied the skipper. With a flash of fire in his tones the brigand ordered: "Take the first ten sacks of mails out into the desert and burn them at once." "It shall be done, O chief," replied Max, who immediately detailed some of the natives to carry the order into effect, when the captain, urged to it by the judge, asked:-- "What is the amount of the tribute?" "Ten thousand pounds in English gold," came the immediate reply. "I cannot pay it," returned the captain. "It is mere plunder," though the judge pointed out to the commander quietly that it would probably be more profitable to pay it and to get away with the mails in a damaged airship, than to leave the mails behind to be lost or destroyed in the desert. "He will take the gold anyhow, when he comes to it on the bill of lading," added the colonel, "though devil a penny I’d pay him." "It isn’t my money," argued the captain, "so there’s an end of it." "How now, Englishmen! We are wasting time. Will you pay the sum demanded?" "No, I will not!" "Very good. Get out the rest of the mails and burn them at once!" ordered the monarch, and a couple of minutes afterwards the first bags of mails, sprayed with some inflammatory liquid, were blazing furiously. "Item two!" called the desert king. "Gold. Nineteen boxes of bullion for the Bank of England," called out the chancellor. "Gold?" echoed the air-fiend, as though he were utterly unconscious of the presence of such a commodity, in face of the captain’s refusal to pay over a trifling ten thousand pounds to secure right of way for his mails. "Yes, sir. Nearly one hundred thousand pounds in specie."