“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.
With that out, you figure big business. It is always proper to blame
Wall Street for everything from the earthquake in Japan to the fact
that it didn’t rain in the wheat-belt during July. Well, that’s out,
too. You might know that anything I was connected with would turn out
to be a farce-comedy eventually. I had to lay back in my bed and laugh
myself sick again when I heard it. If there’d been any bullets left in
my carcass they’d have clinked together like a castenets.
The fact of the matter was that a wealthy, gentle, gray-haired old nut
inventor--a man who’d evidently gone crazy trying to get a perpetual
motion machine or something like that--was really responsible for the
whole thing. He’s safely ensconced in a lunatic asylum now, working on
a mechanical flyswatter or something like that. The facts are
approximately as follows:
This old fellow was a multimillionaire, and for years had been trying
in his senile way to invent things. Finally he’d concentrated on the
Air Service, and had been submitting to McCook Field all sorts of
things from a motor run by gun powder to an automobile that turned into
a ship, wings sprung out, a propeller attached to the front of the
motor, and all that. Naturally, all his stuff was infinitely
ridiculous. If you don’t believe how many crack-brained inventors there
are who submit perpetual motion machines and all that, ask an official
of any big company, or the patent office. And McCook Field gets its
share.
He had been a harmless old coot, although a nuisance. Well, when the
bombing was broached, he set to work, and figured out a scheme to carry
bombs, each bomb to be hung under an individual balloon which was to be
filled with poison gas. Then there was some magnetic idea which would
make the bomb and the balloon go straight for the battleship attracted
by the steel in it. When the bomb hit, the balloon would burst and
spread poison gas all over. The only thing he hadn’t figured out was
what would become of the pilot, except that he might jump into the
middle of the ocean in a parachute.
This old bird was very patriotic, offering all his nutty ideas to the
Government free and clear. Now comes the hitch. A soldier of fortune,
named Gimbel, and reputedly--I never met him--a very keen, unscrupulous
and strong-minded person, had attached himself to this old gentleman
and worked him for a fairly comfortable living, suggesting newer and
nuttier ideas and pretending to help him work on them at a comfortable
salary.
The old boy trusted him a good deal, and was pretty strongly under the
sway of said Gimbel. Gimbel had decided, evidently, that he wanted a
big piece of change all in a lump, instead of putting up with the
vagaries of the old boy for merely a stipend, so to speak. So he’d
worked on the old boy’s mind, helping him become convinced that there
was a deep laid plot to keep the Government from taking advantage of
this priceless method of bombing.
The inventor was absolutely certain, finally, that the Government was
in the hands of traitors who were working deliberately to make the
bombing tests a failure, or at least, not as successful as they could
be. The Martin factory, Gimbel convinced him, had bribed high
Government officials to make them turn down his invention so that they
could sell a lot of very expensive ships.
Then Gimbel convinced him that, in view of the fine patriotic motives
behind the scheme, it would be a good thing to get rid of the factory
entirely, thus at one and the same time getting rid of a big business
which was working against the country for their own ends, and forcing
the country to use the balloons and bombs of the inventor, which, of
course, would be tremendously successful.
Gimbel patriotically offered to burn the Martin factory, or in some way
stop the use of Martins in the tests, for a consideration of three
hundred thousand dollars to be paid him because of the risk. The old
boy fell for it and, when the thing was broken up, was actually working
about fifty men getting the magnetic apparatus ready, and had sent a
letter to a prominent rubber company in Akron, warning them to be ready
to furnish the Government at least thirty free balloons at a month’s
notice.
Gimbel, hot after the three hundred grand, had decided to carry on
after the failure of his attempt to ignite the factory in Cleveland. He
had assured the old boy that the wrecks in Boundville had been due to
the rotten construction of the Martins, and did not plan to let him
realize what he was actually doing.
You can see, by the methods used, how easy it would be to ruin enough
ships _en route_, without being caught, they figured, to cause the
bombing to be a bust that year. And that meant Gimbel’s three hundred
thousand. He had got the aged millionaire so completely _non compos
mentis_ that the poor old man considered it a holy crusade for the good
of the country.
The way Gimbel was operating was this:
Two men had drifted to the field at Boundville, without anybody seeing
them, chatted with Marston, and then suggested some coffee. They had
doped it, so Marston slept like the dead and they came back and filed
the wires. In the gang Gimbel had collected--three men, it
appeared--there was one flyer. In some way they were informed when I
left Cleveland--that would be simple enough--and their plan of shooting
me down was a very good one.
The wreck would have been a total, soul-satisfying and complete
catastrophe, of course, with four tons dropping a few thousand feet out
of control. Fire would have been inevitable, and the chance of ever
discovering, from two heaps of bones, that we had been shot would have
been negligible. By the time it was decided the two flyers would have
been safely away, anyhow.
They might have reported the wreck themselves, or landed, looked over
the bones, and made certain that any tell-tale signs of bullets had
disappeared before they did anything about reporting it. Any farmers
around would have known nothing whatever about such technical matters,
and guns can not be heard above the roar of motors.
* * * * *
On my way back to Langham, and for several hours before I started, I
had a good chance to think over all that Marston had done. Desperately
wounded as he was, he had had to climb from his cockpit over into mine,
get the ship under control from the seat alongside me, leaning over to
grasp the wheel, and then unbuckle my belt and heave me out of my seat.
Then he had probably slid into my seat himself, and in some way pulled
my far from minute body up beside him. He had flown the bomber back
into Cleveland, amateur as he was at airmanship, and stanched my wound
and let his own bleed.
When I arrived at the field all the gang were there. The leading flyers
of the border, the California fields and even from Panama, Hawaii and
the Philippines, were on the job practising for the big chance. And
Marston was still the hero of the field.