CHAPTER XXIV

48—48

It was rather late on the following afternoon that Florence received a hurry-up call from Danby Force. She went at once to his office in the mill.

As she entered she found him in a fine state of excitement. He had been pacing the floor but, as she entered, he turned abruptly toward his desk. Snatching up a handful of pictures, he held them out to her.

“Look at these!”

Florence looked. “They were taken inside the mill,” she said.

“By a spy!” His eyes fairly shone. “And with the camera you gave me, the little one that is worn in a button hole. Whose is it?”

“I—I truly do not know.” Her head was in a whirl. “But I—per—perhaps I should tell you. Yes, yes I must. Hugo stole a picture, a very rare little painting.”

“Stole it?” He stared.

“Yes. He stole it. Can’t be any doubt of it. I saw it in his private room. I took it for the rightful owner. This—this camera was behind it. Was it—”

“It was his beyond a doubt.” Danby was staring harder than ever.

At that moment the girl thought she caught some stealthy movement about the ivy outside the window. She looked quickly. Did she catch sight of a face? She could not be sure. If so, it was gone on the instant.

“Hugo!” Danby’s voice rose. “Hugo! He is our spy! Who would believe it!”

He pounded hard on an electric button. Mark Sullivan, the day watchman, appeared at the door.

“Mark,” Danby said in a steady tone, “go find Hugo. Bring him here. If he refuses to come, use force—but bring him!”

But Hugo was not to be found. He was gone. He had flown in the truest sense of the word. Strangest of all, it was the little French girl, Petite Jeanne, who aided in his escape. This may not seem so strange when we recall that Jeanne had never seen Hugo and that Hugo surely had a way with the ladies.

It was late afternoon of that same day. Petite Jeanne sat in the door of her dragon fly airplane. The door faced the sun. She was basking in its warmth. She loved the sun, did this little French girl. She had once heard an aged gypsy say the sun was the smiling face of God. A rather fanciful remark this, yet it had stayed in her mind. “At least,” she told herself, “God made the sun and everything He created is good, so surely He means us to enjoy the sunshine.”

All day long, without presuming to call upon the busy Danby Force, or even upon Florence, Jeanne had wandered through the town and had come to love it.

“It is wonderful!” she had said to Madame Bihari. “And to think that any possible harm might come to it! This indeed is too terrible!”

She was thinking of all this when her eye caught sight of a person approaching rapidly. It was Hugo.

“You are Petite Jeanne,” he said. He appeared to be in great haste.

“Yes, I—”

“I am a friend of Florence,” he said, casting his spell with a beaming smile.

“A friend of Florence is my friend.”

“Ah!” One might have detected in the man’s deep intake of breath a feeling of great relief.

“Then you will help me!” he exclaimed.

“But yes, if I may.” Jeanne was on her feet.

“If you would but take me a short distance in your plane—it will not require an hour—you will be back before dark.” Hugo talked rapidly as one in great haste.

“What could be easier? Will you come aboard?” Jeanne climbed to her place at the wheel.

Ah, poor Jeanne! Had you but known!

A little thrill ran up the little flier’s spine as her plane took to the air. She felt restless, ill at ease.

“Ah well,” she whispered, “just one more incident in a flying gypsy’s life—nothing more.”

It was more, much more than that, as she was to learn.

Time passed. In Chicago it had been dark for two hours. Rosemary Sample was seated at her desk in her own private room. A radio head-set had been clamped down over her ears for two hours. She was reading a book. At the same time she was listening. She had not forgotten her promise to be on the air listening every evening she was at her home port, listening for that code number she had given so long ago, but never forgotten.

Of a sudden the book dropped from her nerveless fingers. A message of startling clearness had reached her ears.

“48—48! Petite Jeanne! One hundred miles north of Happy Vale, an abandoned farm. You will see my plane. Help! Come quick, or you may be too late!”

“Too late?” Rosemary repeated, springing to her feet.

A moment later she had Jerry, the mechanic, on the wire:

“That motor done?” she demanded. “This is Rosemary Sample.”

“Just finished. But say!—”

Rosemary hung up.

Another moment and she was talking to Willie VanGeldt.

“Willie,” she said, “this is Rosemary Sample. Be down at the flying field in a quarter hour. I’m going to take a ride in your plane.”

“A ride? That’s great! Say—”

Once more Rosemary hung up.

When Willie appeared, prompt to the moment, he found his plane oiled, fueled and ready for flight.

“What’s happened?” he demanded. “You said you’d never fly in my plane. You—”

“Hop in,” Rosemary commanded. “I’ve had duplicated head-sets put in. We can talk on the way. We’ll be flying the best part of the night.”

Willie’s mouth dropped, but, be it said to his everlasting credit, he never faltered. Three minutes later they were in the air flying an air-lane in the dark.

Rosemary shuddered as she thought what the outcome of this journey might be. Not that night flying over a regular air route, such as they were to follow for hundreds of miles, is usually hazardous. It is not. The way is “fenced” in by code signals broadcast by radio stations along the way. If the pilot is on the beaten path he hears a series of dot signals. If he swings to the right, this becomes dot-dash, and if to the left it becomes dash-dot, so he never loses the way.

“Unless—” the girl whispered to herself. She had seen to it that Willie’s motor was O.K. She smiled grimly as she thought of the month’s pay it would cost her.

“But if I had chartered one of our own planes, it would have taken half a year to pay up.” That, with her mother back in Kansas looking to her for part of her support, was not to be considered. “I just had to come!” she told herself. “I promised. And that little French girl would never call unless there was some great need.”

“Listen to that motor!” Willie chuckled in her ear. “Never heard it rattle along so sweetly.”

“No,” Rosemary agreed, smiling down deep in her soul, “I guess you never did!”

“For all that,” she thought, “he’s a real sport, shooting away like this into the night without asking a single question.”

“Willie!” she exclaimed aloud, “We’re getting dot-dashes! You’re off the course.

“There!” she sighed ten seconds later. “That’s O.K.”

So they zoomed on into the night.

What had caused Jeanne to call for help?

She had flown the hundred miles when, to her surprise, she was ordered to make a landing on a pasture of what appeared to be a small farm.

This was a level country. She experienced no trouble in landing and in taxiing her plane up to a spot near the house.

“Wait!” Hugo commanded. “There may be some message to take back.”

There was that about Hugo’s look, the tone of his voice that gave Jeanne a sudden impulse.

“As soon as he’s inside I’ll take a run down that pasture, then go into the air,” she told herself.

As if he had read Jeanne’s thoughts, Hugo turned and looked back. Then it came to Jeanne as a sort of revelation, “He must be one of the spies! And I—I have been aiding him to escape!”

Hugo had disappeared through a door. Like a flash Jeanne leaped for the shadows beneath a window.

There, chilling and thrilling, she listened to strange voices. There were, she told herself, a man and a woman. They spoke in a foreign tongue. But Jeanne, who had lived long in Europe, knew a little of many tongues. She was able to understand enough to know that they were discussing the advisability of flight over the border.

“But have you all the papers?” a woman’s voice demanded.

“Yes, all.” It was Hugo who answered. “Pictures, diagrams, plans, everything. They are there in the black bag.”

“If only I had that bag!” thought Jeanne.

But now they had reached a decision. They would come out. She must not seem to have been listening.

To her surprise, as she sprang toward her plane, she saw that it had grown quite dark. The discussion had lasted longer than she had thought.

“Here! Where are you?” Hugo called. “We have decided to ask you to fly us to Canada. We will pay you very well.”

“I—I’ll have to see if I have enough gas,” Jeanne said in as even a tone as she could command.

This was true. But that was not all. She meant, at the risk of her life if need be, to get off a message. Then it was that, after softly closing her cabin door she had sent the message that reached Rosemary Sample’s ears and sent her flying away into the night.

“But what am I to do next?” Jeanne whispered to herself, all but in despair. What indeed?