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!