_A Strange Trip_
Three mornings later Vicki, Cathy, and Johnny Baker strolled across
the concrete apron in front of Gate Five at Idlewild to board the ship
for their return run to Tampa. Today the skies were clear, but the
wind blowing across the huge airfield carried the crisp, cold bite of
winter, and small snowdrifts were still piled up against the heavy wire
fencing that enclosed the passenger area.
“Where’s Captain March?” Vicki asked Johnny. “He’s late this morning,
and that’s not like him.”
“Captain’s already on board,” the copilot said. “He boarded her in the
hangar.”
“What’s the matter?” Cathy laughed. “Doesn’t he trust the ground crew
to see that she’s ready to fly?”
“Don’t ask me,” Johnny replied, grinning good-naturedly, “I’m just the
copilot. I take over the controls when the captain tells me to and I
don’t ask questions. Then one of these days, if I’m a good boy, I’ll be
a captain myself. I’ll know all the answers, but of course I won’t tell
them to the rest of the crew. So there’s no use asking me anything--not
now or a couple of years from now when I’ve got another stripe on my
sleeve and am sitting up there in the captain’s seat.”
“You’re a big help,” Cathy scoffed.
“I told you I was,” Johnny said.
As the three entered the plane from the landing ramp, Captain March
emerged from the flight deck, followed by a stocky man wearing a blue
business suit under a light-gray topcoat.
“This is Mr. Jones,” he said, making the introductions. “Miss Barr,
Miss Solms--Mr. Baker.”
Mr. Jones nodded briefly to each of the crew members in turn.
“Mr. Jones is making the flight with us,” the captain explained. Then
he said to Mr. Jones: “Just take any seat you like, sir. These young
ladies will see that you get anything you want.”
Mr. Jones removed his topcoat, handed it to Cathy, and sat down in
an aisle seat opposite the door. He took a folded newspaper from
his jacket pocket and began to read. Captain March and Johnny Baker
disappeared through the forward door that led to the flight deck.
Cathy had carried Mr. Jones’s topcoat to the wardrobe amidships. Vicki
followed her down the aisle.
“It looks as if something’s up,” she said in a low voice.
“I don’t go to the movies for nothing,” Cathy remarked. “That Mr. Jones
has ‘cop’ written all over him. We must be carrying something pretty
important today. A shipment of diamonds, maybe, or gold.”
Gold! Suddenly Vicki remembered the antique gold coins that were being
sent from the New York museum to the Pirate Festival in Tampa. Could
they possibly have them on board this flight? That could account for
Mr. Jones and the captain riding the ship out from the hangar. And
especially if, as Cathy had suggested, Mr. Jones had “cop” written
all over him. Oh, well--! She shrugged off the thought. If they were
carrying a shipment of gold, she’d never know about it.
Vicki looked at the passenger list which she still had under her arm.
There was Mr. Jones’s name all right, along with an assortment of other
typical American names: Smith, Cooper, Levin, Carpenter, Fagan, Morris
... One name caught her eye. She pointed it out to Cathy.
“F. R. Eaton-Smith. My, that sounds important. Who do you suppose he
could be?”
“Sounds English,” Cathy commented. “But let’s go. Here they come.”
An attendant had opened the wire gate, and now the passengers for the
flight were streaming across the apron to the loading ramp. Vicki
stood by the plane’s open doorway, the passenger list in her hand, and
checked off the names one by one as the passengers entered.
“You are Mr.--?”
“Cooper.”
Vicki made a check beside his name.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Cooper. You’re bound for Atlanta.”
Atlanta was their one stop en route to Tampa. Vicki studied the man’s
face quickly but carefully. Part of her job was to make her passengers
feel welcome on board by remembering their names. The man walked down
the aisle and took a seat by a window.
One by one the passengers filed through the doorway. An elderly couple.
A woman with a little girl. A young man and woman in their early
twenties who displayed all the familiar outward appearances of being
honeymooners. The next man had a distinguished air about him. He was
portly, dignified, well-dressed. His rimless glasses were so highly
polished that Vicki could not see his eyes behind them, only brilliant
reflections of sunlight.
“I am Mr. Eaton-Smith.” His voice was as dignified as his appearance.
So this was F. R. Eaton-Smith! His appearance certainly fitted his
name. She turned to the next passenger.
He was a thin, frail old man, wearing a battered felt hat over his
badly trimmed gray hair and a shabby overcoat with a frayed collar.
He clutched a battered violin case under his arm, as though he had
been unwilling to trust it with the rest of the luggage in the cargo
compartment. He certainly didn’t look, Vicki thought, like a man who
was accustomed to first-class air travel.
“Good morning,” Vicki said brightly. “Your name, sir?”
The old gentleman looked startled. “I--I’m Amos Tytell, miss.” He
looked around the big cabin. “Where--uh, which seat is mine?”
“Take any seat you like, Mr. Tytell,” Vicki said. “But if you want to
look at the scenery, I’d suggest that you sit next to a window. We’re
going to have clear weather all the way.”
Finally the last of the passengers trooped aboard. The door was closed,
the landing ramp wheeled away by the ground crew, and Captain March
started his engines. One by one the big, four-bladed propellers whined
as they turned over slowly, then coughed and spat small puffs of blue
exhaust smoke and suddenly burst into a steady roar, the revolving
blades making bright, shiny disks that gleamed and sparkled in the
morning sun. The big ship vibrated with the pounding of the air stream
against her sides and strained at the wheel brakes like a race horse
impatient for the start. At last Captain March taxied out to the end
of the runway, waited for his signal from the tower, and when he got
it, gunned the ship down the concrete strip and lifted her into the air
as smoothly and gently as a bird.
Once the airplane was off the ground and droning up to cruising
altitude, and the NO SMOKING--FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign had blinked out,
Vicki and Cathy made their way up and down the aisle, chatting with
their passengers, offering them chewing gum and magazines, and doing
everything they could to make them comfortable and put them at their
ease.
Mr. Eaton-Smith interested Vicki particularly. Maybe, she thought,
it was his curious double name with the hyphen in the middle. Now,
with his hat off, she could see that his large Roman-looking head was
a little bald on top. And Vicki was again impressed by his air of
dignity. When she came to his aisle seat, she said politely:
“Anything I can get for you, Mr. Eaton-Smith? A cup of coffee? A
magazine perhaps?”
Mr. Eaton-Smith smiled. It was a curiously mechanical smile--polite but
certainly not warm or cordial.
“No, thank you.” Then he added: “I think we’ll have a pleasant flight
today.”
“Yes,” Vicki said. “Clear skies all the way. I can see that you’re a
veteran air traveler, sir.”
Mr. Eaton-Smith seem flattered. “Yes, I think I might call myself
that--since I’ve flown just about all over this globe of ours.”
“Oh?” Vicki said. “Are you a foreign correspondent? A writer?”
Mr. Eaton-Smith beamed. “No, but you’re close. I’m a travel lecturer,
and I operate a small travel agency in Tampa. Just to have a sort of
headquarters, as you might say.”
“Just ring if there’s anything I can do for you,” Vicki said.
“I certainly will, and thank you.”
The frail old man sitting across the aisle from Mr. Eaton-Smith was
certainly not a veteran air traveler. Vicki could tell that at a
glance. He actually looked frightened as he sat tensely in his seat,
still wearing his overcoat and with his violin case clutched between
his knees. A breath-taking panorama was unfolding just below the window
next to which he was sitting. But he was paying no attention to it,
staring intently at the back of the seat in front of him.
“Are you feeling all right, sir?” Vicki asked gently. “May I take your
overcoat?”
“No--no, thank you, miss. I--I’m cold.”
Vicki bent over him anxiously. Why, this man was half fainting!
“Are you feeling ill, sir?”
“Hungry,” he whispered.
“Just a minute.”
Vicki hurried to the galley. Obviously, Mr. Tytell could not wait until
lunch was served. She placed a sandwich and a cup of coffee on a tray
and carried it back to the old man.
“There,” she said. “That should make you feel better.”
He was so exhausted, or so nervous or ill, that his thin, heavily
veined hands shook, and Vicki had to help him hold his coffee cup. She
did not attempt to talk to him as he ate. When he had finished, he
smiled at Vicki gratefully.
“I feel better now.”
“That’s good. But why did you let yourself grow so weak?” She knew it
was against the rules to ask personal questions, but she felt a genuine
concern for this frail old man. “You didn’t have breakfast, did you?”
“No.” A tremor seemed to pass over his face.
And what a sensitive face it was, Vicki thought. She had known
musicians before. She knew what dreamy, impractical people most of the
old ones were. Was this man starving? His suit coat, underneath his
overcoat, was worn and threadbare. His thin, gray hair looked as though
it hadn’t been cut in months. His ticket showed that he was going to
Tampa.
“The Florida sunshine will do you a lot of good, Mr. Tytell. Are you
visiting your family in Tampa, or friends?”
He raised his weak, pale-blue eyes to hers. “All the family I have is
my grandson. And he’s in--in a school in New York. Yes, I’m going to
visit friends.” He hesitated and grew silent.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” Vicki said hastily. “It’s a long flight and I
just thought you’d like to talk. But now perhaps we’d better wait till
after lunch.” She looked at her watch. “That won’t be long now, and you
can have a good hot meal.”
She removed the tray from his lap and started to walk away, but the old
violinist plucked at her sleeve.
“Please don’t leave, miss. I’m glad of a chance to talk. You don’t know
how lonesome I am. And you’re the first kind person ...”
The eyes in his worn face were pleading. Vicki sat down in the empty
seat beside him. Poor, frightened little scarecrow of a man!
She touched the violin case. “You must be a musician,” she said
encouragingly.
“This isn’t a very good instrument. Just an old fiddle. I had to sell
my good violin to pay for--” Again his voice broke off and he fell
silent.
“You’ll be in Tampa just in time for the Gasparilla Festival,” Vicki
said, trying to cheer the old gentleman up.
“The--the _what_?”
“The Pirate Festival. Didn’t you hear about it when you planned this
trip? It’s the gayest time of the whole year.”
The old man sighed. “It isn’t as if I had exactly _planned_ this trip.”
“Why, it sounds as if you didn’t want to go to Tampa at all, Mr.
Tytell!”
“But if I--” The old man’s voice sounded scared. For an instant he
closed his tired eyes. “I’m talking too much. Excuse me, miss.”
Vicki got up.
“Miss, what’s your name?”
“Victoria Barr. But all my friends call me Vicki.”
“Thank you, Vicki.” Mr. Tytell relaxed in his seat and closed his eyes.
As Vicki turned to go down the aisle to the galley, she noticed out of
the corner of her eye that Mr. Eaton-Smith, from his seat across the
way, was looking at her and Mr. Tytell with a curious interest. The
next moment, the dignified gentleman turned his attention again to the
magazine he had been reading.
Now it was time for lunch, and Vicki and Cathy had their hands full
preparing lunches for the more than sixty passengers who were on the
flight today.
She glanced out a window. The ship was flying above Virginia now, where
scattered white patches of snow were melting in the brown fields. Soon
they would be approaching the green fields of the Carolinas. There
wasn’t much time to get the passengers fed. Vicki forgot everything in
her concentration on her job.
Vicki worked her way up the aisle of the plane serving the luncheons,
carrying one tray at a time, making sure that each passenger had a
cushion on his lap upon which to rest it, inquiring whether he would
care for coffee or tea. When she came to Mr. Eaton-Smith’s seat,
she noticed that he had moved across the aisle and was now sitting
next to old Mr. Tytell. The old man was dozing, his eyes closed. Mr.
Eaton-Smith put a finger to his lips.
“This gentleman seemed to be ill,” he whispered. “I thought I had
better move over here and see if there was anything I could do for him.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir,” Vicki said, as she placed Mr.
Eaton-Smith’s lunch tray on his lap. Old Mr. Tytell’s eyes fluttered,
and their glance caught Vicki’s for a split second. They looked like a
begging puppy dog’s eyes, she thought.
In a few minutes she had brought the tray for the old man and helped
him steady it on his lap. He picked up a fork and began to toy
listlessly with his food, keeping his eyes fixed upon his plate.
Back in the galley, cleaning up the remains of the lunch, Vicki
couldn’t get her mind free of the shabby old man.
Promptly on schedule, Captain March circled his plane over Tampa and
landed.
The mysterious Mr. Jones was the first person to get off when the
ground crew pushed the landing ramp up to the door. He spoke briefly
to one of the crewmen on the ground, and the two of them stepped around
to the tail of the plane, next to the baggage-compartment door.
Then Vicki saw the rest of her passengers off the ship and said good-by
to each one as he was leaving.
“I hope you had a pleasant trip, Mrs. Peterson. Ride with us again, Mr.
Levin. Good-by, Mr. Harper.”
She saw old Mr. Tytell coming toward her, still clutching his battered
violin case. Close behind him was Mr. Eaton-Smith.
“Good-by, sir. Have a pleasant stay in Tampa.”
“Good-- good-by, Miss Barr.” He glanced back over his shoulder for a
moment in the direction of his seat, and when his eyes returned to
Vicki they held an odd, hopeless look. “Thank you again.”
Behind him, Mr. Eaton-Smith was visibly impatient at the delay. He
brushed against the old violinist’s shoulder, and Mr. Tytell, feeling
the slight pressure, lowered his head and seemed almost to scurry
through the exit door.
Speaking mechanically to the other passengers as they left, Vicki kept
an eye on the tired old man as he went down the ramp and across the
apron, Mr. Eaton-Smith following at his elbow. She wondered who was
going to meet Amos Tytell. But he walked straight on through a group of
people who were obviously waiting to greet incoming friends and was
soon swallowed up in the crowd.
With the last of the passengers gone, Vicki and Cathy went rapidly
through the big cabin on a final inspection tour. The empty seats
were reclined at all angles; pillows, magazines, and newspapers were
scattered over them in confusion. At one seat she picked up a small
package that had been forgotten. She’d take it to the _Lost-and-Found_
desk in the terminal building.
In the seat that old Mr. Tytell had occupied something peculiar caught
her eye. It was a Tampa visitor’s guide, part of the travel literature
and other reading matter carried in the plane’s seat pockets. But it
was folded in the shape of a sort of pyramid and was standing upright
on the seat.
“Odd,” Vicki thought, and reached over to pick it up. As she did so,
she noticed that the exposed page was an advertisement for a restaurant
located in Ybor City, Tampa’s old Latin Quarter. The restaurant was
called the Granada, and under the name was the slogan: “The liveliest
and most popular meeting place in Tampa’s famed Ybor City.”
The words “meeting place” were underlined by a wavery pencil scrawl!
Had the old man left this as a signal? She remembered his furtive
over-the-shoulder glance as he was leaving the plane. Maybe he had a
job at the Granada playing in the orchestra. But why hadn’t he come
straight out and said so? Vicki wrinkled her pretty brows in a puzzled
frown. Was something strange going on here? Or was she just imagining
things?
She tucked the folder into her jacket pocket and went on with her work.