CHAPTER VI

SUSPICION AND SUSPENSE

Full of their horrifying suspicions, Curt and Bob rode on. Al turned off on a side street to deliver a parcel at the home of his new boss, “Sandy” Jim Bailey, the rigger. Al wanted to “make himself solid” with the sandy-haired man whom he already liked and whose grumbling was over now that he had, as he said, “a willin’ and brainy helper.”

Curt ate lunch with Bob. Both were disappointed when Bob’s mother told them that his father had been called out of town on his case, accepted earlier.

Riding back, to rejoin Al, who was waiting at the gate of the plant ground, Bob accosted his brother in some surprise.

“Aren’t you going to have lunch?” he asked.

“I had it,” Al told Bob and Curt. “I delivered that package for Mr. Bailey, and met his son, Jimmy-junior. He’s just about my age, and an awfully nice fellow. He invited me, so I stayed.” He dismounted and set his wheel inside the enclosure. “You ought to see the model airplanes he builds. They’re great!”

“Well, we can’t stop to talk about them now. Mr. Barney Horton left word with the gate-man we are to come into the administration offices to see him.” Bob led the way as he gave the information.

“It will give us a chance to look over the office staff,” Curt explained.

“Be careful, Al,” his brother warned him. “See that you don’t let anybody guess that you see any suspicious things. You show everything on your face, you know.”

“All right.”

Barney greeted them in his private office and introduced them to Mr. Tredway’s partner, Mr. Parsons, who was there.

If his manner was somewhat abrupt and his mind preoccupied, Bob made allowances for that. The man was overcome by the mishap and its sinister outcome.

His restless, seemingly uneasy, and almost furtive actions, however, were not so easy to account for. He seemed unable to meet the eyes of the comrades directly, and appeared to be nervous—even more than the circumstances justified, Bob thought.

Almost on top of the introductions he hurried out, “To get out there where the airplane cracked up and see what’s what!” he explained.

“He takes it mighty hard, he does,” Barney told the youths. “No wonder. He’s Mr. Tredway’s partner.”

“But there isn’t any real certainty that anything terrible happened to Mr. Tredway,” asserted Curt. “He might have jumped clear.”

“Yes, and maybe he was hurt, and managed to swim off to some part of the shore and wasn’t able to go any further. They haven’t searched every possible spot have they?” Al was hopeful.

“I’m afraid they have,” Barney replied. “Furthermore, there are so many soft, muddy sink-holes in Rocky Lake——”

“Do you agree with what the people in the plant are saying?” Al asked.

“I don’t know, my lad. You see, it’s a good idea, having you here. When I’m around the people shut their mouths. But you hear things. What are they saying?”

“They think it’s something worse than missing parts and damage done to the ‘crates’,” Al answered and explained, calling on Curt and Bob for their versions of the talk.

“Hm-m-m. Well, Al, I think—if I were you—I wouldn’t listen to the talk around the plant too hard. Pick it up, of course, but don’t go making any theories of your own out of it.” Barney explained that people buzzed like a lot of flies every time anything happened, and that many of the less sensible ones, liking to be “in the limelight,” worked up almost idiotic theories. Usually, if they were accepted, they led to unjust suspicions, he argued.

“Those scatter-brains only want an audience to listen to them,” he declared. “I’d advise you to listen and let it go out the other ear. Otherwise you may get off onto the wrong notion. Better watch out for suspicious actions, and leave the theories to Mr. Wright.”

“But he’s away,” argued Al.

“Only temporary, I guess. Anyhow, you can tell me what you hear and see, and let it go at that. I’ll communicate with Mr. Wright, and if he thinks there is anything as bad as you say, I can tell you how to go on.”

“All right,” agreed Curt.

Bob and Al added their own agreement to the suggestion.

The designer and the engineering staff were introduced and several hours were devoted to discussions between them, for the benefit of the trio, about airplane design and the things that had to be taken into consideration.

“If my young friends are going to learn airplane building,” Barney asserted, “it will be better if they know how important it is to figure stresses, safety margins, stability and so on, before ever a design gets on paper.”

“I thought all those things came out in the tests, after the airplanes are built,” Al contributed.

“Oh, no,” the designer said. “The tests show us how well we figured and how good the designs are that we created. But we work everything out up here before ever an engine part is cast, a fuselage built or a wing assembled.”

“Any other way would be hit or miss,” Bob agreed.

While they learned the many sections into which an airplane design is divided, and how carefully every curve, streamline, distribution of weight, lift of wing and drag of body must be calculated, Bob decided that no one in the office—at least no one with whom he came in contact—was acting in any suspicious manner.

Able to do nothing about the accident, the staff went on with its accustomed work, sadly, more seriously, to be sure, but steadily.

However, when Bob returned to his engine assembling work, he met a new character, and one of whom he at once formed an unsatisfactory opinion.

By association of ideas Griff Parsons fell under his suspicion because the youth, about eighteen or nineteen, was the son of the man Bob had seen in Barney’s office—Mr. Parsons. Griff, whose handclasp was flabby, whose eyes were even more shifty, whose manner was still more uneasy than his father’s had been, did not impress Bob favorably at all.

He had something on his mind, Bob decided.

Assigned by the engine department foreman to help Griff fit piston rings onto the small pistons, to fit the piston assembly into the cylinders, before the final assembly was made, Bob learned much, and somewhat more about Griff than about the nice adjustments of machinery.

If he turned suddenly, Griff almost jumped, having hard work to control his muscles.

When he spoke of the morning’s accident, Griff, with a scowl, told him to “Keep your mind on what you’re doing! That other ain’t any of your business!”

Bob had hard work not to show his antagonism to the gruff, snappish young man; he was grateful when a summons took him out into the yard.

“I think it is a good idea to have you fellows treated as though all you are here for is to learn about airplanes,” Barney greeted him. “Your Cousin Langley is going to take up the sister ship to the cracked up Silver Flash, this afternoon, and I’m sending all three of you with him. It will give you a chance to understand what the designer told you about how carefully he had estimated the shape and weight of the new type longerons and how some mistake that he hasn’t been able to figure out yet makes the new crate tend to slip off sideways too easily. Langley will show you how he checks and reports, and then you will understand how every one of us works in harmony with every other one, to build our ships airworthy, safe and steady.”

When they joined Lang, who was busy checking his dashboard instruments as the engine warmed up on the line, Bob, Curt and Al did not hook safety belts on. They had every confidence in Lang’s ability to handle the ship, and they were more anxious to be near him so they could talk than to sit along the cabin sides unable to communicate their news to him over the roar of the engine.

As soon as Lang sent the powerful engine into speed, racing down the runway into the wind, lifting the elevators to catch the propeller blast and tip upward the nose, then flying level, just above the ground for those essential few seconds in which flying speed was regained before the climb, Al opened the conversation.

“Lang,” he cried, pitching his voice to offset the noise about them, “did you know what they are saying about the accident?”

Langley nodded.

“This seems to be a test flight,” he said. “But I’m really flying over to the airport, in the city suburbs—Barney wants you along to scatter and pick up talk there.”

“What’s the airport got to do with the mystery?”

“Barney thinks that mysterious crate we saw in the field might have something to do with it,” Lang responded to Curt’s question.

“But Barney told us not to go building theories,” Bob objected.

“He’s older, and better able to see things clearly,” Lang reminded him. “So we will climb pretty high, as if for test dives and slips, and skids, and barrel rolls—you’d better be sure to snap your safety belts—not right now, though. This crate slips pretty sharp. But——”

“I think we’re wasting time,” declared Bob, “flying to the airport.”

“Why?” asked Lang.

“In the first place, the airplane was carefully hidden. No one at the airport would know anything about it. In the second place, I can’t see how it could link in with the crash——”

“Unless its pilot was higher than Mr. Tredway, and flew over him and forced him down—” Al was excited at his deduction. He felt puffed up.

“We would have seen him,” objected Curt, crushing Al’s inflated vanity.

“By the way,” Bob broke in, “let’s talk about something else. If Barney sent you for information, that’s that. Never mind what we think. What I want to do is to get a line on that fellow named Griff—Griff Parsons.”

“Why?” Lang swung in his seat, catching the shift of the crate with almost automatic movements of stick and rudder bar. “What about him?”

“He’s the son of the superintendent, isn’t he?” asked Curt.

“Yes,” Al broke in, “and what’s more, I suspect that ‘super.’ He looks like the sort who could do tricky things. Did you see his eyes?”

“Yes,” agreed Curt. Lang cut the motor, and glided gently, to hear better.

“But what has that to do with Griff?”

Bob, surprised at the sharpness of Lang’s tone, frowned.

“He looks like the same type as his father—same shifty eyes, same restlessness—furtiveness!”

“Say! See here!” Lang became suddenly angry. “You let that young man alone and keep your unfair suspicions off him.”

“Is that so?” Al was angry, too, all at once. “Who are you to give us orders?”

“I’ll let you know who I am if you go on suspecting innocent people. What’s more, I’ll have Uncle Fred yank you out of there so quick——”

“What makes you so hot under the collar?” demanded Bob. “What is it to you if we suspect Griff? Is he an angel that we have to keep our minds off him?”

“He’s a mighty good friend of mine!” snapped Langley.

All of them were angry. Curt, not related to the others, felt that he ought to intervene between the quarreling cousins, but something in the unreasoning fury of Lang’s next words stopped him.

“See here!” Lang forgot he was piloting an airplane, and swung around on his seat, his face working. “If you keep on, if you bother Griff, or try to trail him, or anything—I’ll have Uncle Fred yank you out of there so quick——”

“Oh! Look out!”

Forgotten, the airplane, with no guide, answered automatically to the thrust of Lang’s foot on the rudder bar as he whirled on his cousins. The shift of the rudder swung the nose, and Lang’s instinct made him operate it to make the ailerons bank the ship, but she had almost lost flying speed, the all important velocity which gives the wings lifting qualities.

Sickeningly the airplane tilted. Al, Bob and Curt, not strapped fast, tumbled sidewise, and the unstable craft tipped down.

Abruptly, realizing the slip and the danger, although they were quite high, Lang “kicked rudder” sharply.

To his dismay, there came a dull, snapping thump and one end of the rudder bar worked free.

The cable had either come loose or had snapped!

And, with its unstrapped occupants in a huddle, on the side which was lowermost, the lower wingtip turned straight downward, the other pointed toward the sky, the windowed sides were in the position of floor and ceiling—and the airplane began to fall!

“Three thousand feet,” Lang’s eyes consulted the altimeter. “Three——”

Momentarily he lost his “nerve” and faltered.

Bob, on the instant, acted!