Part 3

They obeyed pronto, talking to each other continuously and with no one listening to anybody else. I had a sort of a kind of a plan of procedure staked out by the time I got down and faced the scaredest, whitest, most shaken-up sergeant in the American or any other army.

“You’re sicker now, I presume,” I told him grimly.

Marston could not speak. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he was a truly pitiful sight, I suppose, had I had room for any pity in my mind.

I was about to launch forth on something, when one of the occasional sensible ideas I get seized the opportunity to make itself known to me. So I folded up my tongue and said curtly:

“My elevator controls went bad on the take-off. Looks to me like Fernald’s went bad in the air, and it was just the grace of ---- he was over the water, and only a few feet high. Help me with this fuselage.”

Marston, as I said, was like a man in a trance. His weakness seemed to have been effectually scared out of him, and he didn’t try to vomit once. Which gave me pause for thought, in itself. _He_ hadn’t been in my ship.

* * * * *

We looked at the elevators, which were absolutely undamaged. The control wires were attached to the little cabane struts above and below the great linen fins--but they hung loosely. Then I broke through the fuselage carefully, so that patching would be all that was necessary to repair it, and took a look inside. The tail-control cables go through the fuselage, and are not visible from the outside except at either end.

In a very few minutes the evidence was all before me. The cables had been filed inside. Not completely through, but nearly. The object was clear. The few unfiled strands of the cables were sufficiently strong to hold and work the elevators when the ship was on the ground. But when it picked up speed, and one commenced to use the things with all the force of the propeller blast, plus the speed of the ship, acting against the surfaces, the cable was not strong enough to hold.

I had been lucky, in a way, in that mine had been filed a bit too much and had broken before I was going at full speed. Les’ had given way over the river. It was my guess that the perpetrator of the thing had hoped that the cables would hold for a while, and give way during the trip some time when the ship was going at an unusually fast pace, getting underneath a cloud or something like that. It didn’t seem likely that he or they would want the wrecks to happen on the field.

Marston saw it, and he was a broken man. For a moment, that is. My eyes must have shown what was in my mind as they finally met his. He straightened like a shot, and his sullen, strained face suddenly flushed as red as fire. He stood there, daring me to say something, and hating me worse than ever because of what had happened. And as I stood there I was utterly convinced that I was looking at as low and rotten a murderer as one would meet in a tour of the United States, where most of the murderers are.

But I held my tongue, except to say--

“Sick or no sick, you’re going in a boat with me and we’ll look over Fernald’s ship.”

He didn’t say ah, yes, or no; didn’t expostulate, explain or try to clear himself. With a baleful glare in his eyes and a shadow on his heavy face he went with me in a Ford, driven by a kid who tried to break all speed records, and we got a boat a half mile away.

We met Fernald’s party on the way. Fernald transfered to my flat-bottomed dreadnaught, while Bailey went on toward shore. The boy was white and sick, the freckles standing out on his face as if one was looking at them through a stereoscope. I just asked one question--

“Did you inspect these ships from tail to nose last night?”

“Yes, sir!” yelled Bailey, his eyes like those of a madman.

Then they sought Marston’s and so did Fernald’s, only Les was calmly curious and appraising, where the overwrought youngster was half insane.

“Beat it on, Bailey, and don’t talk a word,” I told him.

I told Les what I’d found. Marston brooded in one end of the boat while the Boundville veteran, rowing us, bent to his work and asked one question after another which never got answered.

Well, exactly the same things had been done to Fernald’s ship as to mine.

“We’ll talk when we get back,” I told him, jerking my head toward Marston.

George William caught the gesture. A wild, leaping fire flamed in his eyes, and a shaking paw was extended toward me.

“I know what you’ll do!” he snarled. “You’ve got me now, and you’ll railroad me to Leavenworth, ---- you!”

“Shut up, Marston!” I snapped. “Remember who you’re talking to!”

There was a second of tension in that boat which was enough to make one’s flesh crawl. Marston, his full face like a dark demon’s, sat like a statue, arm still out-thrust toward me.

“Listen, Marston,” I said quietly. “No one holds you responsible for this. My opinion is that the men who brought you coffee put dope of some kind in it; that you slept like the dead, while they did the work, and that what they put in the java is reponsible for you being sick. I don’t like you, and I never did and never will, as a man, but you’re a soldier with a good record, and as far as I’m concerned you’re above suspicion.”

His big body relaxed suddenly, as if he had gone suddenly limp. A queer look leaped into his eyes, a sort of calculating gleam, as it were.

“Don’t get excited, Marston,” Fernald advised him in his equable way. “You weren’t supposed to stay up all night, anyway, with the ship after the usual sightseers had left. Nobody’s hurt much. Don’t lose your shirt or go wild.”

“Yes, sir,” mumbled the sergeant, and relapsed into his brooding.

When we reached shore I gave the orders.

“Go to town with Bailey, Marston, and get a doctor for him. Both of you go to bed at the hotel. You’re still feeling bad. My orders are that you spend the day in bed.”

“Yes, sir.”

They trundled off in the same Ford which I had used, and then Fernald turned to me.

“What about it, Slim?”

“Open and shut,” I told him. “It’s as plain as the nose on my face, and that’s no secret. In the first place, Marston, as you may know, got as high as major in the war. I was under him when I was a cadet, and he was a harsh martinet who made life miserable for every cadet. He hated me, and I returned it with interest.

“Just a couple of days ago, when I found him a sergeant, I took off the old blouse and bars and licked him to a frazzle just for old time’s sake. He doesn’t figure there’s room enough in the whole world for the two of us. That cock-and-bull story about a couple of mountaineers driving in, and then bringing him coffee is transparent. He filed the wires.”

“Maybe he’d file yours, and get out of riding because of pretended sickness, but he’s got nothing against me,” Les protested, his eyes resting thoughtfully on me.

“Wait a minute. I don’t figure that getting rid of me was all there was to it. Marston was a major, shot back to a sergeant. That made him hate the whole Army, and the Air Service in particular. I’ve heard him call the Flying Corps a bunch of Boy Scouts, because we’re all amateur soldiers even if we are veteran flyers.

“I can see the change in him. Notice how sullen and discouraged and brooding-like he is? And his life has probably been more or less ---- since he got to be a sergeant, because a lot of men who were under him at Donovan Field probably have ridden him pretty hard.”

“What the ---- are you getting at?”

“Suppose he hates the Service. He knows that these bombing tests are going to make or break not only the American Air Service, but every other Air Service as well, doesn’t he? If we sink battleships, we’re pretty near the first line of defense, aren’t we, and even Congress can see that we’ve got to grow into a big boy, can’t they? And in order to carry bombs big enough to even have a chance to sink ships we’ve got to have plenty of Martin Bombers, haven’t we? And if the Martin factory put out four bombers a week, which is all they can do, right up to the time of the tests we won’t have more than enough, will we?

“And if we don’t get Martins the tests will be off, won’t they. And before the world we’ll be labeled an unreliable branch of the Service, ships uncertain, can’t even get them a few hundred miles to Langham, to say nothing of being sure they’d ever get a hundred miles out to sea to drop bombs.

“Suppose Marston has become so bitter that he’s off his nut a little, and wants to crab the Air Service every way. If he could burn down the Martin factory the tests would be off, wouldn’t they? And he lied about being in bed at the time the fire happened, didn’t he? He did get rid of the first two ships, holding us up several days, and now he’s got rid of two more.

“He didn’t figure the wrecks would happen so quickly. He figured we’d come down in the mountains somewhere, dead as doornails, with the ships so smashed up that no one could tell anything. And if he wasn’t under suspicion at all, back at Langham, some fine night he could see to it that whatever ships finally got there, after you and I were grease spots on the side of a West Virginia mountain somewhere, could be destroyed some way--fire--anything.”

Les took a long drag of his cigaret, and his steady eyes narrowed. Along the road, a hundred yards from the riverbank where we were standing, continuous lines of cars were passing. Several rowboats were out on the river, swarming around the gradually sinking Martin like waterbugs.

Finally he said slowly:

“By ----, it sounds right, Slim. He might be getting even with you and the Air Service at one swoop. But you’re claiming, of course, that he’s a nut. No sane man could cold-bloodedly do what he did to Bailey and me, anyway. Maybe to you.”

“If he destroyed the ships at the field here, he’d be almost convicted before he started,” I pointed out. “By his method, he figured on getting away free and clear.”

“He’s convicted now,” Les returned.

“Sure, because the cables broke too quickly. But not, Les my boy, beyond the peradventure of a doubt, at that. In fact, we might be wrong. There may be some one or company or even country who wouldn’t like to see these tests come off. Listen to my idea of how to proceed to nail Marston right to the cross.”

Les listened, demurred a bit, argued, and finally we came to a decision. He finally agreed whole-heartedly with me on all points. The combination of circumstances was such as to make merely a cluster of coincidences seem very unlikely. Marston’s past, and his present attitude; the fires at the Martin factory; the filed wires; and above all, the convenient sickness which made it impossible for him to go up in the crippled ships, all pointed one way.

Les stayed at Boundville to summon a wrecking crew from Dayton, salvage my ship, and likewise to watch Marston. I wired Washington and immediately hopped a train for that thriving village. I was met at the depot by a pop-eyed trio of high-ranking Air Service officials, was rushed to headquarters without an opportunity to scrub off the cinders, and in less than two minutes I was telling my wild and wooly yarn to the chief himself and six puzzled, scared and completely flabbergasted aides, assistants and adjutants. Having finished the story, I talked about Marston, not even deleting the fight. Following on, I submitted my scheme to them.

* * * * *

To make a long story short, at the end of three hours Chief Mallory got up from his chair, and paced up and down the floor silently for about a minute. He knows more about the Air Service, I sometimes think, than all the rest of the men in it put together. The bombing maneuvers were his brainchild, and he would be made, or broken, before the world by them.

He’d fought everything and everybody for three years, trying to get a chance for his young hellions to show what they could do, and he was pretty close to a temporary madman as he took in the full possibilities of what I had told him. Finally he whirled on me and said quickly--

“If we accept your procedure, Evans, you know what danger you’ll be in?”

“Forwarned is forearmed, General,” I told him. “I hate to run any chance of doing an injustice to Marston, and I’m leaning over backward so far that if I stubbed my toe I’d fall on my neck, simply because I don’t want my personal prejudice against him to result in any possible injustice.”

“I see,” commented Mallory. “Gentlemen, we will proceed as Lieutenant Evans has suggested.”

So I went back to Boundville, and with me came Colonel Feldmore, a spare, thin-faced, hard-boiled, genial and square old colonel who was in the Army before the Spanish-American war. Likewise, there sifted into town and out to Cleveland, various Secret Service men whose identity was known to nobody. Feldmore conducted an open investigation, and the Secret Service men started checking up on the two strange mountaineers, of whom Marston could give but a very vague description.

Feldmore took a half hour to give a tongue-lashing to Marston because he hadn’t awakened, at least, when the vandals were about. But the careful impression built up by every one was that Marston was not suspected in the least of having had anything to do with filing the wires. He was exonerated. Of course, strictly speaking, he could have been punished for laxity while on guard.

But in guarding a ship, except in very particular and extraordinary cases, it is a custom of the Service merely to sleep out there for the purpose of keeping sightseers from climbing all over it. In many cases it isn’t even guarded at all over night. Who’d want to tamper with an airplane? In moonshine country, or among people who have any possible reason for wanting to harm a ship or a flyer, careful guard is kept, of course. But ordinarily not any more than enough to guard a car.

Well, while the Secret Service men were snooping around Boundville and Cleveland, Marston, Fernald, a new mechanic named Gray, shipped on from Langham, and went back to Cleveland to bring the next shipment through. At the depot--Marston not knowing it, of course--was an operative to shadow him every minute.

Marston, as a matter of fact, was in rather a bad way. Despite the fact that he had been, as he thought, absolutely whitewashed, he looked more like a sick pup than ever. His physical sickness had disappeared within a few hours almost magically. But mentally he was an invalid still.

The Martin factory was heavily guarded, of course. The newspaper stories had been carefully taken care of; just a small item explaining my wreck as due to motor failure, and Fernald’s as the result of a sharp downward current of air over the cool water, which is scientifically possible. No word of the filed wires had got about, nor any connection between the fires and the wrecks. Every laborer under suspicion, by the way, had proved an alibi; which, in a manner of speaking, strengthened the case against Marston. The operatives were tracing his movements the night of the fire, among other things.

One ship was ready to ramble when we got there, and it had machine-guns installed in the front observer’s cockpit and also in the radio compartment in the rear of the bomb space. They had been shipped from Dayton, at my suggestion, to help guard the ships if necessary. I wired Washington, and was ordered to proceed with one ship and let Les follow when the second one was completed. Time was getting very precious, there were only two Martins at Langham, and practise must start very soon. Already the brigade would be four ships short--four fewer two-thousand pounders to help sink our battleship.

Marston and I took off bright and early one Wednesday morning. Just before we started I got word that Marston had made no suspicious moves while in Cleveland, had not even conversed with a stranger. Nevertheless I said to him just before we started--

“Ride in the front cockpit, will you Marston?”

It is less comfortable there than beside the pilot, for the folding observer’s stool has no back to it. He looked at me with haggard eyes and seemed about to protest, but he said nothing.

The reason I put him there was to keep an eye on him. Marston, while he did not wear wings, could fly a bit. He had taken some instruction back at Donovan in the old days, just for the fun of it, I suppose. And if the man had it in for me the way I thought he did, I wanted to have him right before my optics at all times.

Lots of things can happen in a ship which those on the ground could never know. For instance, the left hand propeller tip whirled around right close to my head. Marston could grab me suddenly as I was flying and shove my head just a few inches over the side of the cockpit, and said six-foot prop, traveling fifteen hundred times a minute, would have gone through that bony knot on the top of my spine like a buzzsaw would through a cream puff.

Then he could land the ship, maybe safely, and pretend to have cracked it up, thus again killing two birds with one stone. No one would know that my own carelessness had not killed me. I simply mention this as one of the many possibilities. So I put him in front of me, where he couldn’t make a move without my seeing it, and I had a Colt handy to my hand--very handy.

With both twelve-cylinder Libertys well tuned up I taxied over the smooth field at the factory, and took off. Around and around that little slab of green we circled, getting altitude while Fernald, down below, alternately waved and then shook his head. Funny how the Air Service likes to kid by pretending to be sure a man’s going to be killed every time he goes up.

Cleveland is a funny town from the air. It’s very long, along the lakefront, and very thin the other way. It sprawls like a fat worm on the ground. A veritable network of railroads run out of it toward the south, so I set a compass course, synchronized my two motors, read the dizzying array of instruments, and settled back to watch Marston. I figured that, if we had allayed any ideas he might have that he was under suspicion, something might happen. Probably in Boundville again, but just a possibility of something else.

Well, it hit quick. I’ll say it did.

We were roaring along over the large, smooth, many-colored Ohio fields, about twenty or thirty miles south of Cleveland, when I spied a ship coming toward us. It was far in the distance, coming from the south. I figured it was a Dayton ship, of course. As it came closer I identified it as a Jenny, one of the ninety horse-power, two-seated training ships which every cadet broke in on. I thought then that it was a civilian passenger-carrying crate, because no Dayton flyer would make a cross-country trip in a Jenny. It seems like walking compared to a D. H. or a scout.

Marston was sitting there in the nose of the ship, his hands on the machine-gun scarf-mount and his head resting on his hands. His broad, powerful back did not move at all, and he had never looked around. He had his goggles up, I noticed.

* * * * *

In a short time, approaching each other at around eighty miles an hour, the other ship was close to us. It was not an Army ship, for it was painted a bright yellow, and it flashed golden in the sun. It was coming toward us at an angle. That was natural. A Martin Bomber is quite a sight in the air, trundling along like an aerial lumber wagon. It’s so heavy that it’s fairly stable, and after one gets off the ground the wheel handles so easily a baby could work it, so I watched the other ship and flew my huge craft automatically.

The ship was possibly a hundred and fifty yards from us, coming at a slight angle, as I’ve said. It was perhaps fifty feet above us. Suddenly it banked a bit, and its new course brought it on a line parallel to ours, but it was pointed, of course, in the opposite direction. In a flash I caught sight of a double Lewis machine-gun, swung on a scarf-mount in the back cockpit.

As it sprayed its hail of lead I had nosed my big, loggy Martin over as far as it would go. At the same second Marston, I realized, had stiffened, spun half around, recovered, and was at his guns. They had got him-- I saw the blood soaking one arm of his flying suit.

I threw my ship around as the equally slow, but much smaller, Jenny banked and flew back at right angles to us for another shot, from above and behind. I spun the wheel desperately, to get the Bomber’s nose pointed toward the other ship. Subconsciously I realized that all my suspicions of Marston had been wrong. There was some gang trying to crab getting the Martins to Langham.

I was straightened around for them as the Jenny crossed above us, those wicked guns being sighted by the gunner in the rear. We were looking right up into their muzzles, a hundred feet away. Marston was on his knees, sighting too. If we were to get them, I _must_ hold the ship in position for a moment more. It was shot for shot.

It was. I saw Marston’s hand, a mass of blood, pull the trigger of his Lewis as a terrific impact made me cry out and seemed to pin me to the seat. Something crashed through my chest, and I felt as if I had been torn apart. As if in a dream I saw the Jenny spinning downward. Then, through blurred eyes that could not transfer to my brain what they saw, I saw a huge bulk looming above me. It looked as big as all the world. I knew the Martin was diving like mad for the ground, but my nerveless, groping fingers could not find the wheel. And I didn’t care. In short, I went out like a light, my last remembrance being a torrent of blood flowing down over my body.

V

I came partly to, not entirely, in what looked like a hospital, and for two weeks I was so weak I couldn’t even talk. In another week I was out of danger, and by the end of a month I knew I was in a Cleveland hospital. Then Les Fernald and Jim Tolley--Jim had taken my place as a ferry pilot--were allowed to see me.

“So you’re going to get well! My, my!” grinned Fernald. “Can’t the Air Service ever get rid of you?”

“I’m trying my best,” I told him. “What happened after I passed out?”

“Marston got you out of the seat and took the wheel before your ship crashed. He was ---- badly wounded himself, an artery severed, for one thing, but he flew the ship with one hand and held a handkerchief to your chest with another, flew back to Cleveland and landed. That Martin came in like a drunken duck, and he cracked the landing gear all to ----, then fainted in the ship.”

“Is he alive?”

“Sure. But he’d about bled to death when he got here, and you’d have been as dead as the free silver issue if he hadn’t----”

“Well I’ll be ----!” was all that I could think of to say, and Les assured me that I was that already.

“Where’s the sarge now?” was my next question.

“Oh, he got his strength back quick--wounds weren’t as bad as yours--and he’s in the hospital at Langham now.”

“Well, have the sleuths unearthed anything?”

“Plenty, but not all,” big, serious Tolley told me. “One of the men in the Jenny that fought you was alive, but he wouldn’t say a word. They’ve arrested three more, though. Don’t know whether what they’ve said so far is right.”

“Come on--get out of here!” my jovial doctor interrupted at this stage, coming into the room. “Slim’s still weak as a cup of tea. Tell him tomorrow, whatever it is.”

Before I left the hospital Les, who visited me every trip, told me confidentially all that had happened. Hold your breath now, and prepare. I suppose you think that at the very least you’re about to hear that all the countries of the world got together and concentrated their nefarious master-spies in Cleveland and Boundville, bent on the destruction of the American Air Service. Well, they didn’t. There is no international ephillipsoppenheiming about to be indulged in by me.