The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Horace McCoy (1897–1955) was born in Pegram, Tennessee, and went to school in Nashville, dropping out at sixteen to get a job. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War I, he became the sports editor of the Dallas Journal, a job he held from 1919 to 1930. He moved to Hollywood in 1931 to become an actor and to write motion picture screenplays. McCoy had been selling stories, mostly mysteries, to various pulps, the majority to Black Mask, between 1928 and 1932, after which he devoted himself full-time to film scripts and novels, most of which were filmed. His first book, a noir Depression-era existential novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), was inspired by his job as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier, where dance marathons were held; it was filmed by Sydney Pollack, with Gig Young, Jane Fonda, and Michael Sarrazin fourteen years after McCoy died of a heart attack. No Pockets in a Shroud (1937), about a corrupt American city and a crusading journalist, was published in England more than a decade before its U.S. appearance; it was filmed in France. The noir screenplay for I Should Have Stayed Home (1938) was never produced. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) was filmed in 1950 with James Cagney as a near-psychotic criminal. Scalpel (1952) was mostly a medical story filmed as Bad for Each Other (1953), with Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott. Corruption City (1959) was a novelization of The Turning Point (1952), which starred William Holden and Edmond O’Brien.

“Dirty Work,” the first Frost of the Texas Air Rangers story, was published in September 1929.

The Rangers take to the air.

Captain Jerry frost walked through the rotunda of the Texas State capitol, past the oils of Crockett and Houston and Hogg, and into the deep-toned offices of the Adjutant-General.

“What’s on your mind, General?” he said, dropping himself into a chair and stretching his long legs.

“This Jamestown business.” The Adjutant-General drummed on the desk with his incredibly long fingers. “It’s quite a mess.” Plainly he was just a little irritated.

Frost grinned. “Yes, sir. It’s quite a mess.” But the Adjutant-General didn’t think it was so funny. He was quite serious.

“Jerry, for the life of me I can’t understand why all police act so stupidly. This purely is a local case, but they can’t handle it. They bump their heads against the wall and cry for the Rangers. I’m sometimes sorry we’ve got such a thing. Now the bigwigs are kicking.” He held up a small packet. “Know what these are? Got any idea what they mean?”

Captain Frost confessed he hadn’t.

“They’re clippings from newspaper editorials in which the people who sit in the offices of the daily gazettes tell us how to run our great commonwealth. The robbery is up to us. I’m sorry, of course, you had to be ordered off leave. You know what that means, don’t you?”

Jerry nodded. Did he know what that meant? Indeed! And since when had the Adjutant-General become so obtuse? He was tempted to laugh. Did he know what that meant? Hell, of course he knew. What did trips to this office usually mean? Dirty work — that’s what. Dirty work.

He was not offended; he was too much of a soldier for that. It was that he just didn’t have any illusions about the romance of criminal work. That was a lot of applesauce that looked good in print and nowhere else. He had spent two months in the Border Patrol on some tough work and had been promised a week’s leave. He had got but two days of it. Two days on the Galveston beach, and when the messenger boy found him with that fatal telegram from the Adjutant-General he was waiting on a fair young person who would be due in ten minutes.

That annoyed him no end. He had earned a rest, why couldn’t he get it? Now there was more dirty work to be done. That’s all he had ever done, it seemed. God knows, there had been plenty of it in the old Lafayette Escadrille, where he won his wings, and that crazy hitch with the Kosciusko Squadron over in Poland hadn’t been any pink tea. And those four years down in the Guatemalan banana country hadn’t made a dilettante out of him.

Go into any Latin-American country and mention Captain Jerry Frost and nobody would have the slightest idea of whom you spoke. But mention El Beneficio to any soldado and he was all attention. In those countries where men still die for illusions and assume musical names, they tell you that El Beneficio was a bold, roistering Americano who could handle women and a machine-gun like nobody’s business.

No, he was no stranger to dirty work.

“Well,” the Adjutant-General interrupted his reveries, “you can take the pick of the staff. You can do anything you want to. Forty years ago a train robbery in Texas might have been ordinary, but this is 1929. This infernal publicity is bothering me. It’s up to you and the men you name.”

“I’d rather look around a bit first,” Frost said, as he rose to go. “If I need anybody, I’ll let you know.”

“Good luck to you.”

He accepted the hope with a nod of his head and walked out.

Captain Frost expected little information from the chief of police of Jamestown, and he was not disappointed. The chief pointed out that he and his men were after all merely humans, and that they were doing everything humans could do. That this had availed nothing was not his fault. Captain Frost could see that?

Very frankly, Captain Frost said he couldn’t. “It beats me,” he said. “Here it is, the high-powered twentieth century — a scientific age. And a gang of bandits sticks up a passenger train in orthodox Wild West manner and gets away clean with a fortune. Every copper in North Texas is caught flat-footed. I’d like to have the opportunity sometime to get in on top of a case instead of waiting two or three weeks. I sure would.”

“Well,” the chief observed pointedly, “maybe we can arrange that just for you. It’s a funny thing, but criminals never invite us to their parties. However, they might make an exception for the Rangers.”

“Never mind the wisecracks! Didn’t anybody in North Texas make any reports or anything after the robbery? It looks to me like a correspondence school sleuth could have done that.”

“Ain’t I been telling you they didn’t? There wasn’t nothing to report! My God, don’t say that any more to me! It makes me sore all over. Every newspaper in this town has been plastering stories all over their front pages about it. It’s got me goofy!

“Now, listen while I go over it again. Then you’ll know as much as we do — or anybody else does. That train carried $300,000 in torn money that was going back to Washington. It left Jamestown, going east, at 8:45 and when it got to Reddy, about eight miles out, it was flagged down by a man on the track with a lantern. A moment later the engineer and fireman looked into the muzzle of a sub-machine-gun held by a masked robber.

“While this one kept the engineer and fireman covered, another went in the express car, blowed open the safe and got the coin. They slipped in on the messenger, tied him up, but when Cummings, the brakeman, ran through the door, they dropped him with a slug of lead in the forehead. Before anybody else knew what it was all about, the train started. It stopped a little farther on, but the bandits had disappeared.

“It happened right beside the highway but they had put red lights half a mile apart to stop the traffic. It’s the general opinion that they are hiding out somewhere, but we’ve got the numbers of some of the bills and sooner or later we’ll nab the men. Nobody can beat the law!”

It was the sort of a preachment Frost could expect from the chief. He was a man who had been in the chair for twenty years, and was slightly antiquated. One of the old school, as the newspaper boys liked to say.

“Now you know as much as we do.”

“So that’s all, eh?”

“All? Ain’t it enough? It’s been plenty to keep these newspapers in copy. It ought to be enough for you.”

“Are you worried about what they think?”

The chief glared. “Ain’t you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, I am; you’re damn well right I am. We got an election coming off here next month and unless the right guy gets in, I go back to pounding a beat. Damn if these crooks can’t pick fine moments to pull big jobs! So, you see how much I’m for you. Personally, I’ll let you have my moral support and hope you have a lot of luck. But I don’t think you will!”

Somebody once wrote that clever crime detection is one-third luck, one-third hard work and one-third intuition. Great detectives rate luck and intuition as a stand-off, which is to say they reckon one as important as the other.

Jerry Frost was not a scientist, he was not a criminologist, he was not, in the technical sense of the word, a detective at all. But he had had a fair amount of luck thus far, he was perfectly willing to work hard, and he knew his intuition had stood him in good stead before.

And he was going to be able to use it this time. He realized that an hour after he had left the Jamestown chief of police.

He saw something that clicked in his mind — and would not be shaken. The very incredibility of the thing was what sold him.

He had dropped into the Secret Service offices of the government in the Federal Building, for, after all, it was their case. His conversation with the inspector had not been especially productive. But his eye caught a picture on the desk. It was a wrecked airplane, and he naturally was interested.

“This was a sweet one,” he said. “Where’d it happen?”

“That,” replied the inspector, “is an old one. It happened about a year ago. I was rummaging around my desk the other day and found it.”

“Nasty spill.”

“Yea, Charlie Cox got killed in it. You ought to remember that. The air-mail pilot. He crashed up in the Red River country. We lost a registered pouch in it.”

“Oh,” said Frost. “I do remember now. Never got anything on that case, did you?”

“Nope, never did. None of the bonds ever showed up.”

“Ever have any ideas about it?”

“Well, not exactly. Charlie just crashed, that was all. Somebody came along and took the pouch. Anybody’d know the difference between registered mail and ordinary mail. We figured some farmer had got it, but we watched that country for a long time. None of the bonds ever showed up. Just another one of those mysteries.”

It was at that moment that Jerry got his idea. But then it was too ridiculous. His intuition kept trying to tell him something, but he wouldn’t listen. The voice was too faint. A little later the idea came bounding back again. And he couldn’t lose it. The air-mail job. What made him think it was connected with the train robbery?

He wondered. Still, there had been innumerable baffling crimes solved by leads much more absurd than this. The air-mail job. Well, the idea was there to stay. He couldn’t get rid of it.

He slept on it all night. Or tried to. Writing people and artists know how that is. You can’t tear those things out of you. They weigh you down like an anvil. Sometimes you can’t breathe comfortably. You think of it for hours and then very suddenly it comes, clear and clean, like big handwriting. All you have to do then is sit down and copy it.

Frost was like that. In the morning, it took definite form. It wasn’t nebulous any longer. That air-mail job hadn’t been an accident. It was premeditated. Everybody thought it was just one of those things that have to be a part of any new field of endeavor when man pits his brain and brawn against nature. But Jerry was willing to bet his life it had been premeditated.

Once, down south, when they were having a lot of fun with Salazar and Madero, a grizzled veteran had said, “Kid, when you get a hunch — ride it!” Well, that wasn’t always so easy. The odds were big. No matter if you had a strong body, the odds were big. But Jerry Frost had a hunch. And he was going to ride it.

It all depended on one thing, and he went out to see about that. He wasn’t the least bit surprised when he discovered the spot where the train had been held up was but a few hundred yards from Withers Field, the municipal airport. He had expected it.

He telephoned the Secret Service chief and the Jamestown chief and made the same request of both. It was for them to forget they had seen him.

Irrespective of the theories of the investigators, and their verdicts, Jerry was convinced the mail plane had been tampered with. To do that required cold nerve and daring that not every criminal possessed. Find the man who conceived that idea and you had the brains behind the train robbery. And he was a man who would need and who would have a sound knowledge of airplanes.

That afternoon he reported to the hangar of the Mid-West Air Transport Company at Withers Field with a letter of introduction to Captain Eads. An hour before Captain Eads had been telephoned that one Thomas Femrite, a name Jerry adopted for obvious reasons, was to be given employment as a mechanic and test pilot.

He knew, of course, that there was little chance of any of the bandits being at the Field now. But that flying field once had been the center of their operations. That wasn’t much to work on, but it was something. It was considerably more than anybody else had decided.

“Captain Eads?” Jerry asked.

A man seated at the inside desk turned and looked. Before him in the door stood a man six feet tall and as brown as a nut. He had long arms, long legs and good eyes. He looked every inch a flyer. There is something about a new man who comes to a flying field that compels attention. You immediately size him up and wonder how much stuff he’s got, and whether he’s going to be a heel or a good fellow, and whether or not he can fly. Captain Eads decided this lad would do.

“Mr. Femrite, reporting for duty.”

“Come in, Mr. Femrite. An old army man?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought so. What outfit?”

“The Forty-seventh.”

Captain Eads lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? Pretty good gang of crate-busters. The downtown office telephoned me about you. How many hours have you had?”

“Oh, six or seven thousand.”

“Whoosh! That’s plenty. Well, you’ve come to the right place if you’re a seven-thousand-hour man. We need men who can assemble motors and who aren’t afraid to fly those same motors. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Red!”

An oily individual who escaped being a dwarf by a few inches shoved his auburn head through the door.

“Take Mr. Femrite around and make him acquainted. He’s going to work for us.”

Getting acquainted with the Mid-West crew was the work of but a few moments. Red was short, Jerry learned, for Fred Walker, and apart from him the only other veteran was Slimmer King. There were a couple of youngsters but they didn’t count. They hadn’t passed the prop-spinning stage.

Going over big was simple with Red and Slimmer. Jerry spoke their language. The kids were aloof, but after he had stunted one of the rickety Travelairs one afternoon, they warmed up and immediately made him a model.

Nor had his maneuvers hurt his prestige with the old-timers. Jerry had all but knocked the knob off St. Peter’s gate. That particular day he went crazy. What he didn’t do with that old bus hadn’t been invented.

“Gee, you looked great!” Red beamed. “But I thought once or twice we oughta kissed you good-bye before you left the ground.”

“Stop kidding, Red. I bet you can do things with a crate I’ve never thought of.”

“Naw,” Red confessed. “I ain’t much of a stunter. I can get ’em up there and get ’em down and that lets me out. I wasn’t born to kick no rudder bar. My head belongs in a motor.”

After that, things came easier for Jerry. The ice had been broken. He came to know something of the other fellows on the Field. He was particularly attracted to the bunch in the No. 6 hangar. They were commercial men.

He sensed a sort of rivalry between the Mid-West fellows and the bunch in No. 6. There was no particular reason for it, but he did. Ostensibly, they just about had the commercial business at the field sewed up. The Mid-West wasn’t in competition with them, yet they growled and glared every time Jerry got close. He spoke to Red about it.

“They’re just a gang of five-dollar-a-lick boys,” Red said. “Don’t pay them any attention. They haul passengers, but personally, I wouldn’t let one of ’em push me in a wheelbarrow. I just don’t crave their company.”

“There’s no reason for them to be sore at me,” Jerry said.

“That’s their way. They’re sore at everybody. The farther away from those guys you stay the better off you’ll be.”

But he had no intention of staying away. He was curious. So the next day, under the pretext of borrowing a porcelain, he invaded their hangar. He went up to the fellow who had been pointed out as Casey.

Casey gave him the porcelain. He was stocky and careless in his personal appearance, even for an airplane mechanic. “Where you come from, feller?”

“Oh, all over,” said Jerry.

“I saw you yesterday doing some fancy flying. Looked like you’d wobbled a stick before.”

“Yep — I’ve wobbled ’em before.”

“You a new air-mail pilot?”

“Nope, just a mechanic.”

“Well, there ain’t many mechanics can fly like that.”

“Oh, I dunno.”

“A guy like you is wasting his time meddling with spark plugs and pushing a gasoline truck over a flying field. You’d ought to get in the big money. Commercial stuff.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“It is good.” Casey was positive. “Any guy what can bust clouds like you can is wasting his time drawing two hundred bucks a month. Interested?”

“Maybe. Much obliged for the porcelain.”

That night Captain Jerry Frost reported to the Adjutant-General by telephone. He reported that he had become established and that the outlook was promising and that something possibly would happen soon.

The Adjutant-General, still annoyed, retorted that something would happen soon — to the entire force. “They’re still raising hell,” he said bluntly. “Let me send you some help.”

“Now, listen,” said Jerry firmly. “Any outside interference will gum the whole works. You sit tight and stop worrying. And don’t send anybody! Forget all about it.”

The Adjutant-General grumblingly agreed, and then told himself he was glad Frost was on the job. If anybody could do it, Jerry could.

Jerry was convinced the gang in No. 6 hangar wasn’t all everybody thought it was. He had been made an overture, and he expected another. To bring it about, he spent the next few days in direct defiance of all the laws of flying. He was either a plain damn fool or the sweetest pilot who ever brought a bus down on one tire. He almost tore the ships to pieces. All this time the gang in No. 6 looked on.

One night Casey and another man, of a distinct continental air, visited the Transport hangar.

“Meet Mr. Crouch,” said Casey. “He’s the boss of our outfit.”

Jerry shook hands with him.

“I’m glad to know you,” Crouch said. “I saw you the other day and I wanted to congratulate you. I’ve seen a lot of flying in my time, but I don’t think I ever saw the equal of that.”

The man spoke with a slight accent, and a high voice. It was an unusual tone. Something in Jerry’s memory stirred. He looked into the face closely. Gray mustache. Black eyes, sharp and deep-set. A small mouth and thin lips.

He had seen that face somewhere before. But where? The panorama of his life passed swiftly. It produced nothing.

“Thank you, sir,” Jerry said. “I sometimes think I was born with my feet on a rudder bar.”

“You were,” Crouch agreed; “and that’s just the point. You are the type of man commercial flying needs. Would you consider a change?”

“Well,” said Jerry, “a fellow always needs—”

“Exactly. And you’re worth just twice as much to us as you are to the air-mail people.”

Jerry debated for a moment. He had no idea of refusing; he just didn’t want to be too anxious.

“I’ll take it.”

“Good! When can you leave?”

“When do you want me?”

“Tomorrow. We’re opening a hangar at Waco. You’ll be on hand in the morning?”

“Yes, sir. I don’t think they’ll hold me.”

“Of course they won’t! If necessary, tell ’em to go to hell!”

Getting his release was simple. He merely got in touch with the home office, where the officials knew his mission and identity, and explained the situation. They in turn notified the Field. There was little comment. There seldom is. Young flying men are notorious nomads.

Waco was but an hour’s hop from Jamestown, and as Jerry was eager to get there he left at once. During that hour he rolled his memory before him, seeking to pull from its kaleidoscope the face of the man called Crouch. That high voice rang in his ears above the drone of the motor; and gradually the years fell away.

Flying now, as he was flying then, the slender threads of memory were picked up more easily.

Once more he was in the air over Bapaume with the 47th. This was Richthofen’s old stamping ground and the Boche knew it like birds. Jerry was flying a Camel at 8,000 feet. They were climbing in close formation. He looked ahead and to the right. There was Bapaume in all its raggedness, half-obscured in the mist. On his left were a couple of youngsters. They waved. They were going through the agony of their first patrol. He had gone through it two months before. But it hadn’t wrecked him. He hadn’t a lot of imagination. He was sure of himself. But he knew it must be hell on the youngsters. He thought he’d better keep an eye on the eaglets.

There were clouds above — gray blanket clouds that came together in a solid roof, with only a gaping hole here and there to reveal the blue. Bad stuff. The squadron leader knew. He kept them climbing. Jerry glanced again at the youngsters. It bucked him up a bit to think about them. They were green. He squinted his eye and put up his thumb to have a look around the sun. They were up above now. He warmed his guns. The chatter reminded him that he was tired. So this was war. Well, they could have the damned war for all he cared. He was tired. He wished... And then he caught himself. A fellow couldn’t do that. It wasn’t decent. He was in it, no use wishing he was out. Then he saw he was straggling. Straggling was suicide. They were out in Richthofen’s country. The Baron’s men were devoted to stragglers. They ate ’em alive. He looked up. His intuition again.

His throat closed abruptly and his knees melted. An Albatross was coming down fast. His wing fabric was ruffling into lace and the wood of his camber ribs was splintering. He pulled up sharply and pressed his trigger. Both guns vomited. He was firing wildly. The Albatross slipped under him. Oh, for a fast bus! His Camel would do 100. An S.E. would do 135. A Spad would do 140. And an Albatross would beat that. A butterfly-winged Albatross. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Sping! A shower of gasoline. His motor conked. He fell over in a dive. The Albatross followed him down. The Spandaus were rattling. He could hear them above the bite of the motor. A hundred red-hot needles hit him in the shoulder. Her dammed something warm back with his lips. Something warm and wet. The dirty, lousy swine! Fine stuff! What the hell? He was done... he was falling. The Spandaus rattled fortissimo. A drumlike roar, blackness swept, swirled over him...

A high-ceilinged room. The penetrating smell of anesthetics. A face that bent over and shut out the depth of the room. An enormous face by contrast. He slowly made it out. He moved his body and winced. Bandaged. The face grinned. It spoke.

“Never,” said a high, irritating voice, “break formation. How did I hit everything but your head?” The face came closer. The Pour le Mérite swung out on its ribbon. “Byfield, my name is. You’re my personal prisoner...”

Jerry tried to laugh. Instead he fainted...

That had been eleven years ago. The vision passed and its present significance came upon him so suddenly he went into a renversement that almost popped his neck. Byfield! The German Ace! Crouch! By God! There was dirty work somewhere. His first vague hunch, even so soon, assumed the form of reality. There could be no doubt that he was on a trail that would lead somewhere.

Out of the mists loomed the Amicable Building, perennial landmark, sentinel of the Brazos, gaunt and lonely for want of companionship. Bearing to the left, he came over the field and settled down. He was trembling as if he had been out on his first patrol.

Byfield!

A luxurious cabin plane idled down and disgorged two men. One was Casey. The other was Crouch, né Byfield. It was all Jerry could do to keep his hands off the man’s throat.

“You must have been in a hurry,” said the high voice.

That voice! There was no doubt of it now. Von Byfield. Every step of the way now was fraught with danger. He half hoped Crouch wouldn’t see it in his face.

“I was,” he said finally.

“Well, there’s a lot to do. We’ll brush up and visit the newspapers.”

They brushed, breakfasted, visited. Crouch planted all his ideas. But that was simple. He had them talking about it already. There were a dozen pilots coming in from New Mexico and Arizona to take part in the circus. A dozen men who, Jerry knew full well, were bums. And then he thought it was funny that he should be walking beside this man in such a placid way... the man who called himself Crouch, who had shot him out of control and then followed him down. He had prayed to meet him a hundred times — and now he had. And he was helpless. Funny.

That afternoon the pilots dropped in. That afternoon they were not an impressive collection. Just as Jerry thought, they were tramps. He thought they were a tough-looking bunch of eggs to be pilots. Had it come to the point where there was as much evil in the air as on the ground? God forbid. The air was the last outpost of chivalry. Of romance. It was dead as hell everywhere else. And it wouldn’t be long—

But his big shock came later in the afternoon.

He discovered a portion of the hangar falsely constructed. From the outside it seemed all right, but from the inside it seemed shorter than it should be. He opened a door and stepped into semi-darkness. A ghostly form confronted him. And another.

There is nothing quite so ghostly as to come across an airplane in a poorly lit hangar. Even if you are expecting it, you are half startled. There is something weird about it, even if you are an airman. It strikes at the roots.

Jerry recovered from his shock and opened the door wide.

The light revealed two planes. Two planes so lovely, so trim that his breath came in a swift intake of admiration. Two tiny planes that seemed unreal. Watch fob types. He moved closer. And stopped.

He saw they weren’t so lovely. They were grim. Trench mortars looked like that. They looked like playthings — until they belched. Then they were hideous. On the cowling of each of the planes was mounted a machine-gun, its squat muzzle merging almost indistinguishably into the background.

He was amazed. He hadn’t, in his wildest fancies, anticipated anything like this. He hadn’t seen a plane like this since he had left the Polish front. Not even then. Those things were hayracks compared to this. Before him stood two of the highest products of scientific civilization.

“Good-looking, eh?”

The voice cracked through the hangar like a sputtering electric wire that has found a ground. For a moment Jerry was disconcerted. Only for a moment.

“I’d give a month’s salary to fly one of them!” he breathed.

“Yes?” It was evident Crouch didn’t know whether to be angered or amused. He decided on the latter course. “Maybe you will. They’re patented. I’m trying to sell them to the government. I wouldn’t like for anybody to know I had them.”

Jerry caught the faintest hint of a threat in the words. Of course, it was a lie. It wasn’t even a good lie. He knew that, and he knew that Crouch knew he knew. Crouch must have thought he was several different kinds of a prize fool to swallow that one. But he was just as anxious to repair the damage as his employer.

“Not a word. You can trust me.”

When they went out, Crouch locked the door with a padlock. Jerry looked back over his shoulder and decided the compartment was well hidden. And he decided something else. To dally with this thing was to play with T.N.T. Crouch and his gang were dangerous. One man couldn’t stand in their way. They had too much to protect.

But what had the air circus to do with it? Jerry felt that everybody knew more than he did. The flyers knotted into little clans and got their heads together. He stumbled around stupidly. It made him, for the first time since he had won his wings, terribly self-conscious.

He stopped Casey later in the day. “Say, I guess I stumbled onto a little family secret this morning.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I saw two of the sweetest little battle wagons—”

“Easy, feller.” Casey turned on him and glowered. “Don’t go around popping off your face. They’re inventions. The old man’s a nut. He’s afraid somebody might steal his plans.”

Jerry gestured disdainfully. “Don’t make me laugh. I wasn’t born yesterday. How come I don’t rate some of the secrets.”

“Listen, you! If there are any secrets, the old man’ll let you in on them. In the meantime, keep your trap shut — tight!”

For the second time that day, Jerry was tempted to crown somebody. But that would have spoiled everything. He had been acting; he could continue.

“Now, now; ain’t I one of the outfit? You pulled me away from a good job — for why? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do.”

Casey melted somewhat. Maybe the kid was right. Maybe he ought to rate a few secrets.

“Well,” he said, “I can’t tell you nothing but this: if there hadn’t been something big doing, the old man wouldn’t have wanted you. He’s a pretty good student of human nature — and he figured you’d been in a jam somewhere and wasn’t too particular what you did as long as it was in an airplane. There’s something about an airman that’s written all over his face. He’s like a schoolboy in love. He doesn’t know it’s there, and even if he did he couldn’t do anything about it. You sit tight.”

Jerry made up his mind to sit.

The air circus came off as scheduled. Good advertisement. It packed the field and roads for miles around. The spectacle of fifteen pilots in the air doing all manner of stunts was appealing anywhere — especially in Waco. They hadn’t seen anything like it since the training days of the war.

Crouch’s business acumen was sound. The trade rolled in. There were innumerable hops. Everybody wanted to fly. The young men visioned themselves not as Foncks and Guynemers and Bishops and Lukes, for they belonged to another age. It was Lindbergh now. The old people grinned as they came in contact with the onrushing age. Jerry caught a passenger to Austin one morning. He had gone on a rush call. He had an hour to wait.

He visited the capitol and found the Adjutant-General in another rage. This was getting to be the best thing the Adjutant-General did.

“What’s the big idea?” he bellowed. “We’re wasting time. I’ve had to fight with myself to keep my hands off. From your reports, we’ve got enough on those fellows to get a conviction now.”

“From my reports — yes,” Frost replied. “But my reports wouldn’t convict them because I haven’t got one single fact. It’s pure hunch. But I’m going to nail them to the cross, and it won’t be long. This is the toughest, nerviest outfit I’ve ever run across in my life. They’d stick up the National City Bank in New York with a little encouragement. But something’s in the wind. I need help.”

“Take anybody you want.”

“It isn’t that kind of help. Listen.”

For five minutes he talked, all the while the Adjutant-General nodded and drummed on his desk top. Hardly had Frost left the office when the state official reached for the telephone and placed a call for the commandant at Kelly Field, the army base.

And thus, that night, one of the new A-3 battle planes, carrying six thousand rounds of ammunition and mounting six machine-guns, dropped out of the darkness at Withers Field and was quickly rushed into the hangar of the Mid-West Air Transport Company and covered with a tarpaulin.

Given that impetus, Jerry felt more confident. Nothing was likely to happen at Waco. If anything broke, it would be at Jamestown. And something was going to break — soon.

Riding his hunch, Jerry was sure Crouch and his gang had wrecked the air-mail plane a year before. They had held up the Rio Grande express. God knows what else they had done. Jerry felt it had been plenty.

He had fitted himself up a bunk in one corner of the hangar on a collapsible cot that was hidden away each morning. He didn’t want to jeopardize the confidence Crouch might have in him.

A few nights later, as he lay there and stared into the darkness, and made up his mind to force the play within the next twenty-four hours, he heard the low drone of a motor. He rolled over and strained his ears. It was faint, then louder, then faint again. Then he heard another sound — a drone. There was enough noise to make him think it was a bombing raid.

Jerry looked at his watch. Four o’clock. Of course, it would be an hour like that. Something was up. Something was going to happen. He slipped into his pants and boots, knocked down his cot and shoved it under a fuselage and strapped on his guns. He went to the far corner of the corrugated hangar. There was an opening there wide enough for him to see. If there was anything to see. Right now it was black night.

Louder and louder the drones came. They were directly overhead now. Jerry wondered how Crouch expected to get away with anything like this. It amounted to pure suicide. And then it dawned that perhaps this was the very reason they had held that air circus. Adjacent residents might not be so curious if they heard motors at night. Or could Crouch have been that much of a psychologist?

Staring through the aperture, Jerry was momentarily blinded by a flash of light as the field was illuminated by two great searchlights. The motors throbbed, clawed furiously as they lost traction, and then whistled as the ships landed.

One was a cabin monoplane. The other was a tiny battle plane.

Then the lights went out. The entire operation consumed not more than two minutes.

Presently there were footsteps. Shuffling footsteps... and low voices. Out of the low conversation his ears picked strange words. Chinese!

Then: “Keep those Chinks quiet!”

Under cover of night, Crouch was running in Chinese.

Frost lay there for ten minutes, thinking. Crouch seemed to have his hand in everything. He heard echoes of automobiles on the highway, the grind of gears coming loud and clear through the stillness; then two men walked back. The office door opened, and a faint glow appeared through the cracks.

He got up and moved closer. He recognized the voices of Crouch and Casey.

“God, I’m glad that’s over.” This was Casey. “Two more trips and then we’re Europe bound.”

“Thompson’s waiting in Mexico City.”

“You wasn’t sap enough to give him the dough, was you?”

Crouch laughed shortly. “Certainly not! Nobody knows where that money is — nobody but I.”

“What do you mean?” Casey asked.

“Well, I moved it.”

“You mean you moved our dough from that train job?” He was incredulous.

“Yes. Remember seeing some guys working on those old asphalt tennis courts behind our hangar at Withers Field?”

“Sure.”

“Well, you thought they were repairing them, didn’t you? So did everybody else. But they were just putting the asphalt over a little hiding place I’d previously fixed up.”

“My God!” Casey ejaculated. “Suppose we wanna get away quick?”

“That’s all right. We can smash that stuff in five minutes. And it was the safest place — believe me.”

“Maybe it was wise. By the way, this wild man we got off the Mid-West ain’t so certain everything’s on the level. He cornered me and asked a lotta questions. I told him if there was anything to say, you’d say it. Might not be wise to stall him. He looks pretty sharp.”

“I don’t intend to. I’m going to talk to him today and he’ll run in the next batch of Chinese. I figure he’s got the nerve to help us pull a sweet one down South pretty soon.”

“Course, you know what you’re doing. But I don’t see the point in hiring him. Never did.”

“Perhaps there wasn’t. But I collect good pilots just like other men collect stamps and books. I like to have them around. But you don’t need to worry about this guy. He’s been in a lot of jams before. You can look at him and tell that.”

“I dunno—”

“Help me get that Moth in.” They moved out on the field.

Captain Jerry Frost came alive. He had them nailed. His suspicions were confirmed. They had done the train job. And unless he missed his guess, those bonds from the air-mail plane were in that cache Crouch spoke of. He moved up in the dark until the two men got into the hangar with their plane. Then he started off on a dog-trot down the road.

At dawn the law forces of the sovereign State of Texas swung into action. They had long been waiting for this moment. The great, ponderous, clumsy law, with its thousands of tentacles, got going. The tide itself was not more relentless. It struck here sometimes, there sometimes, in a circle sometimes — but eventually it straightened out and began to roll. It was inevitable.

The Adjutant-General sat at his desk and manipulated the controls. He was the puppeteer.

Shortly after sunrise, two state planes were in the air. There were six men in each besides the pilot. Six tight-lipped, grim men, who would shoot their way into hell and back again to get their men.

The Rangers were moving up.

In the hangar at Waco, the telephone jangled. Casey answered it.

“Yeah, Casey... all right, Tommy... What’s that? I can’t hear you... wait a minute.” He handed the receiver to Crouch. “The goof is excited. Get an earful.”

Crouch took the instrument. “Hello, Tommy... Yes...” A long wait. Casey moved closer. Something had happened. One look at Crouch’s face told him that. Finally: “Who told you?... Hell!” He slammed the receiver on the hook.

“We’re fools!” He spat the words out. “One of the Mid-West fellows told Tommy this morning that this guy Femrite is a Texas Ranger. Come on!”

“Where?”

“That’s the trouble with you damned Americans,” Crouch cried. “You lose your head in a tight place. We’re going to get that money. Maybe we can make it. He’s waited this long without tipping his hand, maybe he’ll wait a little longer.”

“But what about the others?”

“This is no time to think of them. We can be in Mexico in five hours. Come on!”

They moved quickly to the hangar door, swung it open. They wheeled their tiny, speedy planes out into the starting line. They swung each other’s props, the motors barked into life, and dust and pebbles swept into the backwash and puttered against the side of the hangars.

Crouch was first off. Casey followed. Tails whipped up and wheels bounced lightly on the uneven ground. They zoomed into the air in broad climbing turns. Casey saw Crouch was loading his guns.

They didn’t know it then, but they were to be disappointed. Jerry already was at Withers Field, had been there when Ranger reinforcements arrived. And, of course, a perverse fate decreed they would start at the wrong end of the tennis court.

To see a half dozen apparently intelligent men digging into an asphalt tennis court in the early morning is not a sight calculated to be passed without stopping for a moment. Mechanics stopped, workmen stopped. There was a great textile mill near the field, and a crowd begets a larger crowd.

Jerry was trying to direct the traffic and the Rangers at the same time. Three young men in handcuffs, late of the No. 6 hangar, looked on in undisguised amusement.

Then a shout. Somebody had the pouch. Jerry grabbed it and, with a single movement, slit the side. A handful of currency was extracted. Torn currency.

“That’s it!” he said. “That’s it! Take those men and this pouch into the office. Those other fellows are coming here sooner or later. We’ll make a reception out of it.”

The news swept about the airport like wildfire. The textile mill was all agog. For the first time in many of their lives, they were sitting in the middle of a big event. “The train robbers have been found!” The doorman at the textile mill told the switchboard operator, and the switchboard operator told the secretary. The secretary thought the police ought to know so he telephoned them.

Eagle-eyed news hawks caught the message the moment the desk sergeant finished his yawn and copied it. They flashed their papers. Editors stirred their stumps, called circulation managers, engravers, operators and pressmen. Reporters on the city staff got going, the rewrite man lighted a fresh cigarette off the butt of an old one and rammed copy paper in his mill. He pulled the telephone close. And muttered: “I hope to Gawd this is as big as it looks!”

The word got about Jamestown. Sirens shrieked through the traffic carrying enough police to take Mont Sec. In thirty minutes, the highways leading to Withers Field were choked. Some of them knew what was going to happen, but most of them didn’t. This was the Great American Public.

Speeding north for their plunder before seeking safety, neither Crouch nor Casey was aware of the plans being made for their welcome. Crouch, being of higher mentality, probably thought he had pushed his luck too far, but that was all.

He couldn’t see Withers Field, he couldn’t see Captain Jerry Frost beside the A-3 single-seater, positively the finest thing in battle planes. If Crouch’s ships were lovely, there was no superlative for this. Jerry stood there, his eyes glued on the southern heavens, his propeller swinging idly.

He seemed just a little ridiculous to himself. He couldn’t, for example, grasp that this was 1929. Imagine such a thing with so large a gallery? It was like an opéra bouffe. Still, he tingled. He almost, once, half admitted he liked it.

From out of the distance came a drone. Two planes were seen; they roared onward, still unaware of what awaited them. One dipped downward, the other, which was higher, began a long glide.

The cordon of police started forward.

“Wait a while,” Jerry shouted. “Those ships have got guns on ’em! Take your time!”

But the police disregarded the command. They, too, had waited long. And neither were they self-conscious before the crowd.

Casey was in the first ship, and no sooner had his wheels touched the ground than he realized all was lost. He shot the throttle to his ship and the smoke belched from the exhaust. A policeman fired. The bullet whistled through the fuselage.

Then Casey either tried to zoom, or he lost his head. He later claimed he didn’t know his finger was on the trigger. His guns barked through the propeller and two policemen pitched forward, twitched and lay still. A second later a shot got Casey and his plane dived into the ground.

Crouch had seen and heeded. He had gone into a climb — and he was going south.

Jerry throbbed and pinched. It was the old feeling. Something in him seemed to say, had always said: “Enjoy this, for it may be your last one.” Not fear — and yet it might have been.

He swung his arm out for the chocks to be pulled. His motor whined and then caught with a roar. Something throbbed in his hands and feet and played along his nerves like tiny electrical impulses. He was talking to himself, and there was something terrible in it — prayer and hatred intermingled.

He opened his throttle and his propeller disappeared in a thin circle of light. Like a living thing his ship bounded forward. For a while he bounced along and then he went straight up like an elevator. He climbed 500 feet before it began to stall, then drifted his stick forward and presently flattened out at 140. His bus never even felt it. Tight. Solid. Maneuverable.

He warmed his guns with a burst of twenty. He rather hoped he wouldn’t have to fight. Still, never could tell. Everything was different in the air. Once before, he had been in the same air with Crouch. He had remembered. Maybe there would be a fight after all.

He climbed to 7,500 and buckled on his straps. He had done that before, too. But this was something new. No straining the eyes to the right and to the left and above looking for black specks. No wondering if that was an L.V.G. two-seater — a decoy — with a half dozen Albatrosses lurking above. His man was just in front. Only one.

He crawled up on Crouch’s tail and motioned for him to land. Crouch climbed to the left and got into fighting position. Jerry motioned again. His answer was a burst that raked through the A-3 ailerons.

“O.K.,” Jerry bellowed. “Here we go!”

He half rolled to get on top, so did the other. Jerry touched the trigger and pulled up, dived again. Crouch Immelmanned and straightened out on Jerry’s tail and another burst ripped through the fins. Jerry kicked it off into a slip and leveled out. Crouch was diving away. He was going to run for it. No doubt of that.

Jerry pushed his stick forward until the rush of air gagged him. The rattle of his guns came through the chatter of the motor. Crouch went into another Immelmann and Jerry dived by him. The German was a flyer. But he was not matching skill with the kid he had knocked down that day at Toul. This was another fellow.

Jerry pulled up and went into a climb. He banked sharply and started higher and higher. That was Crouch’s mistake. His ship couldn’t climb with the A-3. Jerry was so close now he could see the wheels on the other’s undercarriage spinning.

Well, there he was. He had him. The trim white belly of Crouch’s ship glinted along the tip of his guns. There he was. There was von Byfield, the great ace. The von Byfield. The one who had followed him down. He could still hear those Spandaus clacking as they raked his body in a steel flail.

Jerry touched his trigger. He could see holes tearing in the linen. He kept his guns open. There was a fan of flame. He noticed his altimeter: 14,000. Too high. And yet... He stalled and whipped out in a spin.

Crouch’s ship hung momentarily like a leaf undecided whether to fall this way or that. Then it dipped its nose and wabbled. The glide became a dive; the dive went into a lazy, aimless spin, wings flopping, to the floor. The plane flattened, whipped out upside down, stalled, snapped out again in a final effort, and then again went downward in that grotesque way. Over and over. Over and over. Jerry watched it, fascinated. It was only a dot now, flashing in the sun as it keeled over. It was coming closer to the floor — closer, closer.

Then suddenly a tiny sheet of flame lashed out, a puff of dust. That was all.

Jerry sideslipped down, landed and taxied slowly in. He climbed out stiff-legged. He looked down and saw his pants were slightly torn. There was a gash in his leather coat. He looked into his cockpit. The floorboards were splintered. He looked up. The center section was riddled. The linen on his fins was ribboned.

Far down the field a group of police and civilians was rushing to the wrecked plane.

“Cigarette?”

Somebody gave him one.

“Match?”

Somebody else struck it. Frost thought those fingers were familiar. Long... white... He looked into the face. The Adjutant-General. He had his arms extended.

“Hurt, Jerry?”

“Nope. Tired.” Quite matter-of-fact. The curious crowded around. The Adjutant-General very plainly was ill-at-ease. It had stirred him tremendously. He wanted to say something nice, but he couldn’t. Men are like that. Especially men who are suddenly overcome with pride. They try to say flowery things, but the words clog up in their throats. They think them right down to the tip of their tongue, and then strange words come out.

It was like that now. The Adjutant-General said: “Well, take a rest. California, Florida. Any place.”

“Nope, Galveston.”

“Galveston?”

“Yep, Galveston. Unfinished business.”

The Adjutant-General nodded. He didn’t understand; he didn’t want to understand. Captain Frost had come through. That was the code of the Rangers. It had been that way when the Conestogas squeaked their way through the Indian country, and it was that way in the day of science and aviation. When all else fails, when there is a knotty problem, when there’s dirty work — the Rangers. Yesterday and today and tomorrow, to the ends of the earth — get him!