The Race

34

HARRY FROST THOUGHT he heard something coming from the east. He saw no glow of a locomotive headlamp. But he knelt anyway and pressed his good ear to the cold steel rail to confirm that it was not a train. The track transmitted no tuning-fork vibration.

Dave Mayhew hunched over his telegraph key. It was he, eavesdropping on the railroad dispatchers, who had suddenly reported the startling news that several flying machines had ascended from Fort Worth in the dark. The blushing bride Josephine’s was among them.

“This time,” Harry Frost vowed in grave tones that chilled the hard-bitten Mayhew to the bone, “I’ll give her a wedding night she will never forget.”

He had been watching the eastern sky for nearly an hour, hoping to see her machine silhouetted against first light. So far, nothing. Still dark as a coal mine. Now he was sure he heard a motor.

He turned left and called into the dark, “Hear me?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Frost.”

He turned right and shouted again.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Frost.”

“Get ready!”

He waited for a return shout, “Ready!” turned to his right, shouted again, “Get ready!” and heard, “Ready!” back.

Sound carried in the cold night air. He heard the distinctive metallic snick when, to either side of him, the machine gunners levered open their Colts’ action to chamber their first rounds.

There were three men on each gun, knee-deep in rainwater left by the evening storms: a gunner, a feeder to the gunner’s left guiding the canvas belt of cartridges, and a spotter with field glasses. Frost kept Mike Stotts standing by to run with orders if they couldn’t hear him.

The noise grew louder, the sound of a straining machine. Then Frost distinguished the clatter of not one but two motors. They must be flying very close to each other, he thought. Too close. Something was wrong. Suddenly he realized that he was hearing two poorly synchronized engines driving Steve Stevens’s biplane. Stevens was in the lead.

“Hold your fire! It’s not her. Hold your fire!”

The biplane passed over, motors loud and ragged, flying low so the driver could see the rails. Josephine would have to fly low, too, making her an easy target.

Ten minutes elapsed before Frost heard another machine. Once again, he saw no locomotive light. Definitely an aeroplane. Was it Josephine? Or was it Isaac Bell? It was coming fast. He had seconds to make up his mind. Bell usually flew behind her.

“Ready!”

“Ready, Mr. Frost.”

“Ready, Mr. Frost.”

The gunner to his left yelled excitedly, “Here she comes!”

“Wait!. . Wait!”

“Here she comes, boys!” cried the men on his right.

“Wait!”

Suddenly Frost heard the distinctive hollow-sounding blatting exhaust of a rotary motor.

“It’s a Gnome! It’s not her. It’s a Gnome! He’s ahead of her. Hold your fire! Hold your fire! ”

He was too late. The excited gunners drowned him out with long bursts of automatic fire, feeding the ammunition belts as fast as the guns could fire. Spitting brass cartridges and empty cloth, the weapons spewed four hundred rounds a minute at the approaching machine.

ISAAC BELL LOCATED both machine guns by their muzzle flashes, two hundred yards apart to the north and south of the tracks. There was no way the gunners could see him, blinded by those flashes. But they were shooting accurately anyway, aiming at the sound of his motor, firing thunderously, stopping to listen, firing again.

Flying lead crackled as it passed close to the Eagle’s king posts.

Bell blipped the motor off, glided silently, then blipped it on again. The guns caught up and resumed firing. Heavy slugs shook struts behind him. The rudder took several hits, and he felt them kick his wheel post.

Bell turned the Eagle around and flew back up the tracks in the direction from which he had come. Facing east, back toward Fort Worth, he saw the gray glow of first light. His keen eyes detected a dot several miles distant. Josephine was coming at sixty miles at hour. He had two minutes to disable the machine guns before she ran into the clouds of lead they were shooting into the sky. But armed with a single Remington rifle, he was badly outgunned. His only hope was to sow confusion.

He blipped his motor off again, banked, and glided silently to the right. He blipped on. The south gun chattered, tracing the noise of his motor but revealing its position. Bell steered for the flashes, swooped low, and fired his rifle. He blipped off the motor and glided over the machine gun. Well past it, he blipped the Gnome again, roared around, and headed back, flying in line with the guns on a course perpendicular to the tracks.

Both guns, the closer south gun and the north gun on the far side of the tracks, opened a deadly sheet of fire. Bell swooped low over the nearer. By its muzzle flashes, he could see three men had the gun mounted on a light landing carriage, which they wheeled skillfully as he passed to rake him from behind.

Bell dropped under the stream of bullets, so low he could see flashes on the tracks. Harry Frost was firing a shotgun at the Gnome’s brightly flaming exhaust. Bell dropped almost to the ground, practically parted Frost’s hair with his skids, and fired his rifle at the north machine gunners, drawing their attention and causing them to wheel their gun and fire at him continuously. Had they held the trigger any longer, the air-cooled Colt would have burned up. As it was he could see the barrel glowing red-hot. But they stopped firing abruptly and scattered for their lives as their emplacement was hit by a burst from the south gunners, whom Bell had tricked into strafing their opposite position while trying to rake him from behind.

A second later, the south gun exploded when the last bullets from the northern emplacement they put out of action ignited their ammunition boxes.

Bell slammed the Eagle in another tight turn and fired his last shots from the Remington at the shotgun flashes. He stood little chance of hitting Frost in the dim light from his racing machine but hoped that Remington.35 slugs shrieking near Frost’s head would make the murderer dive for cover.

Frost didn’t budge.

He stood erect, firing repeatedly, until his shotgun was empty.

Then he jumped from the tracks into the creek bed and ran with astonishing agility the hundred yards to the machine gun whose gunners had fled. As Josephine flashed by low overhead, Frost spun the heavy weapon’s carriage and fired a long burst after her. Bell drove his machine straight at him. The Remington was empty. He drew his pistol and fired as fast as he could pull the trigger. Bracketed by flying lead, Harry Frost fired back until the ammunition belt, with no one to guide it into the breech, jammed.

Bell saw Josephine’s machine dip a wing. It dropped toward the ground, skimming the tracks, and Bell feared that she was wounded or her controls so badly damaged that she would slam a wing into the ground and cartwheel to oblivion. Heart in his throat, he watched with terrible anticipation that turned to astonished relief as the Celere monoplane lifted its wing, straightened up, and wobbled into the sky.

ISAAC BELL STUCK CLOSE to Josephine all the way to Abilene, where the tracks of the Abilene amp; Northern Railway, the Abilene amp; Southern, and the Santa Fe crossed the Texas amp; Pacific. She landed clumsily, skidding half around in front of the freight station. Bell alighted nearby.

He found her slumped over her controls, clutching her arm. A machine-gun slug had grazed her, tearing the skin and furrowing flesh. Her wedding dress was streaked with blood and engine grease. Her lips were trembling. “I nearly lost control.”

“I am so sorry. I should have stopped him.”

“I told you he’s animal sly. Nobody can stop him.”

Bell tied a handkerchief around the wound, which was still oozing blood. Small boys had come running, trailed by old men with long Civil War beards. Men and boys gaped at the yellow machines side by side in the dust.

“Run, you boys,” Bell shouted, “bring a doctor!”

Josephine straightened up but did not try to climb down from her machine. Her entire body seemed rigid with the sustained effort to keep flying. She was pale and looked utterly exhausted. Bell threw an arm around her shoulders.

“It’s all right to cry,” he said gently. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“My machine’s O.K.,” she answered, her voice small and distant. “But he ruined my wedding dress. Why am I crying? I don’t even care about this silly dress. Wait a minute!” She looked around, suddenly frantic. “Where’s Steve Stevens?”

The doctor came running with his medical bag.

“Did you see a white biplane with a big fat driver?” Josephine demanded.

“Just left, ma’am, headed for Odessa. Said he’s hoping to make El Paso in a couple of days. Now, let’s help you off this machine.”

“I need oil and gasoline.”

“You need a proper bandage, carbolic acid, and a week in bed, little lady.”

“Watch me,” said Josephine. She raised her bloody arm and opened her fingers. “I can move my hand, do you see?”

“I see that the bone is not broken,” said the doctor. “But you have had terrible shock to your system.”

Isaac Bell observed the determined set to her jaw and the sudden fierce gleam in her eye. He beckoned the boys and tossed each a five-dollar gold piece. “Rustle up oil and gasoline for Josephine’s flying machine. Gasoline and castor oil for mine. On the jump!”

“She can’t operate a flying machine in her condition,” the doctor protested.

“Patch her up!” Bell told the doctor.

“Do you seriously believe that she’s flying to El Paso in her condition?”

“No,” said Isaac Bell. “She’s flying to San Francisco.”

35

TWO DAYS LATER, Josephine circled El Paso’s business district while Isaac Bell swept field glasses across the rooftops in search of Harry Frost with a rifle. Her Celere monoplane had taken the lead on the run today from Pecos, as it had the day before from Midland to Pecos.

The ground below was seething with ten thousand El Paso Texans who had turned out to greet the aviatrix, primed for her arrival by newspaper headlines blaring:

HERE COMES THE BRIDE!

They crammed the business district to watch from streets, city squares, windows, and sixth-story roofs. Mindful of the mobs they encountered in Fort Worth, Bell had demanded that Whiteway move the actual alighting spot to a more easily guarded rail yard beside the Rio Grande. Looking at the mad scene below, he was glad he had.

Josephine was still giving them a show when Steve Stevens’s big white biplane appeared in the east with Joe Mudd’s red Liberator laboring after it. She circled once more for the crowd, embellished the maneuver with a string of steep spiral dips that set them ooohhhing and aaahhhing, and descended to the rail yard.

Bell landed beside her.

The air racers had battled strong headwinds all day, and their support trains had already arrived. The crews were celebrating. With the state of Texas behind them now, the finish line seemed almost in sight. South, across the river, exotic Mexico shimmered in the hot sun. But it was the west that gripped their interest – the New Mexico Territory, the Arizona Territory, and finally California at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

They weren’t there yet, Bell knew, his eye captured by a series of blue mountain ranges that pointed toward the Continental Divide. To clear even the low end of the Rockies, the machines would have to climb higher than four thousand feet.

He found telegrams waiting. One lifted his spirits mightily. Archie was recovered enough to risk traveling west with Lillian on Osgood Hennessy’s special train to see the end of the race. Bell wired back that they should light a fire under the lawyers angling to free Danielle Di Vecchio from the asylum and bring her with them so she could see her father’s machine had flown across the continent while guarding the race – provided, of course, Bell thought, knocking ruefully on wood, that he didn’t smash it to pieces or get shot out of the sky by Harry Frost.

Less happy news was contained in a long telegram from Research:

PLATOV UNMET UNSEEN UNKNOWN,

Grady Forrer had begun, confessing his failure to turn up anything about the Russian inventor Dmitri Platov beyond the reports from Belmont Park. The head of the Van Dorn Research Department added an intriguing slant that deepened the mystery:

THERMO ENGINE DEMONSTRATED AT PARIS INTERNATIONAL AERONAUTICAL SALON BY AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR/SHEEP DROVER ROB CONNOLLY.

NOT PLATOV.

AUSTRALIAN SOLD ENGINE AND WENT HOME.

CURRENTLY INCOMMUNICADO OUTBACK.

THERMO ENGINE BUYER UNKNOWN.

??? POSSIBLY PLATOV???

Isaac Bell went looking for Dmitri Platov.

He found James Dashwood, whom he had assigned to watch the Russian, staring at the back of Steve Stevens’s support train. A perplexed expression clouded his face, and he ducked his head in embarrassment when he saw the chief investigator striding purposefully straight at him.

“I surmise,” Isaac Bell said sternly, “that you lost Platov.”

“Not only Platov. His entire shop car disappeared.”

It had been the last car on Stevens’s special. Now it was gone.

“It didn’t steam off on its own.”

“No, sir. The boys told me when they woke up this morning, it was uncoupled and gone.”

Bell surveyed the siding on which the Stevens special sat. The rails pitched slightly downhill. Uncoupled, Platov’s car would have rolled away. “Can’t have gotten far.”

But a switch was open at the back end of the yard, connecting the support train siding to a feeder line that disappeared among a cluster of factories and warehouses along the river.

“Go get a handcar, James.”

Dashwood returned, pumping a lightweight track inspector’s handcar. Bell jumped on, and they started down the factory siding. Bell lent this strength to the slim Dashwood’s effort, and they were soon rolling at nearly twenty miles per hour. Rounding a bend, they saw smoke ahead, the source hidden by clapboard-sided warehouses. Around the next twist in the rail, they saw oily smoke rising into the clear blue sky.

“Faster!”

They raced between a leatherworks and an odoriferous slaughterhouse, and saw that the smoke was billowing from Platov’s shop car, which had stopped against the bumper that blocked the end of the rails. Flames were spouting from its windows, doors, and roof hatch. In the seconds it took Bell and Dashwood to reach it, the entire car was completely engulfed.

“Poor Mr. Platov,” Dashwood cried. “All his tools. . God, I hope he’s not inside.”

“Poor Mr. Platov,” Bell repeated grimly. A shop car filled with tanks of oil and gasoline burned hot and fast.

“Lucky the car wasn’t coupled to Mr. Stevens’s special,” said Dashwood.

“Very lucky,” Bell agreed.

“What is that smell?”

“Some poor devil roasting, I’m afraid.”

“Mr. Platov?”

“Who else?” asked Bell.

Horse-drawn fire engines came bouncing over the tracks. The firemen unrolled hoses to the river and engaged their steam pump. Powerful streams of water bored into the flames but to little effect. The fire quickly consumed the wooden sides and roof and floor of the rail car until there was nothing left but a mound of ash heaped between the steel trucks and iron wheels. When it was out, the fireman found the shriveled remains of a human body, its boots and clothes burned to a crisp.

Bell poked among the wet ashes.

Something gleaming caught his eye. He picked up a one-inch square of glass framed with brass. It was still warm. He turned it over his fingers. The brass had grooves on two edges. He showed it to Dashwood. “Faber-Castell engineering slide rule. . or what’s left of it.”

“Here comes Steve Stevens.”

The fast-flying cotton farmer waddled up, planted his hands on his hips, and glowered at the ashes.

“If this don’t beat all! Ah got a socialist red unionist creepin’ up on me. Every sentimental fool in the country is rootin’ for Josephine just ’cause she’s a gal. And now my high-paid mechanician goes and barbecues hisself. Who the heck is goin’ to keep my poor machine runnin’?”

Bell suggested, “Why don’t you ask the mechanicians Dmitri helped?”

“That’s the dumbest idea Ah ever heard. Even if that damn-fool Russian couldn’t synchronize my motors, nobody else knows how to fix my flying machine like him. Poor old machine might as well have burned up with him. He knew it inside and out. Without him, Ah’ll be lucky to make it across the New Mexico Territory.”

“It’s not a dumb idea,” said Josephine. Bell had noticed her glide up silently behind them on a bicycle she had borrowed somewhere. Stevens had not.

The startled fat man whirled around. “Where the heck did you come from? How long have you been listenin’?”

“Since you said they’re rooting for me because I’m a girl.”

“Well, darn it, it’s true, and you know it’s true.”

Josephine stared into the smoldering ruins of Platov’s shop car. “But Isaac is right. With Dmitri. . gone. . you need help.”

“Ah’ll get on fine. Don’t count me out ’cause I lost one mechanician.”

Josephine shook her head. “Mr. Stevens, I have ears. I hear those motors chewing your machine to bits every time you take to the air. Do you want me to have a look at them?”

“Well, Ah’m not sure-”

Bell interrupted. “I’ll ask Andy Moser if he would look them over with Josephine.”

“In case you think I’m going to sabotage your machine when you’re not looking,” Josephine grinned at Stevens.

“Ah didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it. Let me and Andy lend you a hand.” Her grin got wider, and she teased, “Isaac will tell Andy to watch me like a hawk, so I don’t ‘accidentally’ bust anything.”

“All right, all right. Can’t hurt to have a look.”

Josephine pedaled back toward the rail yard.

“Hop on,” Bell told Stevens, and pumped the handcar after her. Stevens was silent until after they passed the slaughterhouse and the factories. Then he said, “’Preciate yer tryin’ to help, Bell.”

“Appreciate Josephine.”

“She took me by surprise.”

“I think it’s dawning on both of you that you’re all in this together.”

“Now you sound like that fool Red.”

“Mudd is in with you, too,” said Bell.

“Damned unionist.”

But the best intentions could not overcome the stress of running rough for three thousand miles. Josephine and Andy tried their wizardry on Stevens’s two motors all afternoon before they admitted defeat.

Josephine took Bell aside and spoke urgently: “I doubt Stevens will listen to me, but maybe if he hears it from Andy he might listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“That machine will never make it to San Francisco. If he tries to force it, it’ll kill him.”

Bell beckoned Andy. Andy said, “Best I could do was synchronize’em for a few minutes before they started running haywire again. But even if we could keep ’em synchronized, the motors are shot. He won’t make it over the mountains.”

“Tell him.”

“Would you come with me, Mr. Bell? In case he gets mad.”

Bell stood by as Andy explained the situation to Steve Stevens.

Stevens planted his hands on his hips and turned red in the face.

Andy said, “I’m real sorry, Mr. Stevens. But I’m just telling you what’s true. Those motors will kill you.”

Stevens said, “Boy, there is no way Ah’m goin’ home to Mississippi with my tail between my legs. Ah’m goin’ home with the Whiteway Cup or Ah ain’t goin’.” He looked at Bell. “Go ahead, speak your piece. You think Ah’m crazy.”

“I think,” said Bell, “there’s a difference between bravery and foolishness.”

“And now you’re goin’ to tell me what that difference is?”

“I won’t do that for another man,” said Bell.

Stevens stared at his big white biplane.

“Was you ever fat, Bell, when you was a little boy?”

“Not that I recall.”

“You would,” Stevens chuckled bleakly. “It’s not somethin’ you’d ever forget. . Ah been a fat man my whole life. And a fat boy before that.”

He walked in front of the biplane, trailed a plump hand over the taut fabric and stroked one of the big propellers.

“My daddy used to tell me no one will ever love a fat man. Turned out, he was right as rain. .” Stevens swallowed hard. “Ah know damned well when Ah go home, they still won’t love me. But they’re sure as hell goin’ to respect me.”

36

JOSEPHINE WAS SPOOKED BY THE MOUNTAIN AIR. It felt thin, particularly in the hottest part of the day, and not as strong as she was used to even at speed. She watched her barometer, hardly believing her eyes, as she circled in the bluest sky she had ever seen, trying to work on altitude above the railroad city of Deming, New Mexico Territory. The makeshift altimeter seemed stuck. She tapped it hard with her finger, but the needle didn’t move. When she looked down, the Union Depot and its Harvey’s Restaurant, which sat between the parallel Atchison, Topeka amp; Santa Fe and Southern Pacific tracks, appeared no smaller, and she realized that her machine was climbing as slowly as the instrument indicated.

Steve Stevens and Joe Mudd were far below her, and she could only wonder how they were faring. She at least had mountain experience, flying in the Adirondacks. Though, to tell the truth, it wasn’t much help when Wild West crosscurrents grabbed her wings, updrafts kicked like a mule, and the same air that knocked her down seemed unwilling to pick her up again. She looked over her shoulder. Isaac’s Eagle, on faithful station above and behind her, was bouncing up and down like it was on an elastic string.

At last she worked up to three thousand feet, gave up on any more, and headed for Lordsburg, hoping to keep climbing high enough to clear the mountains. She followed the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks and soon overtook an express train that had left Deming thirty minutes ahead of her. The locomotive was spewing smoke straight up, slowly climbing a heavy grade, clear warning that the land was still rising, and she had to climb with it.

Grim thoughts of Marco suddenly wrenched at her concentration.

She did not fear that he had actually died in Platov guise. He had warned her in Fort Worth that he would “disappear.” But when he reappeared in whatever form he conjured next time, the first question she had to ask was, who had died in the fire in his place? It was a terrible question. She could not think of an answer she could accept. Thank goodness, she had her hands full for now, trying to get over the Continental Divide, and she had to shove all of that out of her mind.

Ahead she saw the rails enter a pass between two mountain peaks. Despite the pure blue sky everywhere else, a thick cloud bank hung over the pass. It looked like someone had stuffed cotton between the mountains and railroad-tunneled through it. She had to climb even higher to stay above the clouds. If she got inside them, she would get lost and have no clue where the peaks were until she ran into one.

But hard as she tried manipulating her elevator and alettoni, and coaxing effort out of her straining Antoinette, she found herself enveloped by cold mist. Sometimes it was so thick that she couldn’t see the propeller. Then, for a moment, it thinned. She spotted the peaks, corrected her course, and braced for the next blinding. All the way, she had to coax the monoplane to climb. Again the mist thinned. She saw that she had steered to the right, not even realizing it. She corrected hastily. The cloud closed around her. She was blind again. But, at the same time, she felt something in the cloud that made the air stronger.

Suddenly she was above it all, higher than the pass, higher than the cloud, even higher than the peaks, and the sky was as blue as she had ever seen in her whole life in every direction.

“Good girl, Elsie!”

For a crazy moment, she thought she could see the Pacific Ocean. But that was still seven hundred miles ahead. She looked back. Isaac Bell was above her, and she swore that when she won the race the first dollar she would spend of the prize money would be to buy a Gnome rotary.

Farther back, Joe Mudd’s sturdy red tractor biplane was flying in circles as he patiently fought for altitude before tackling the pass. Steve Stevens soared under Mudd, passed him, and shot for the pass, using the power of his two engines to force his machine higher. It dove into the cloud bank straight in line with the railroad tracks. Josephine looked back repeatedly to see him emerge.

But instead of the white biplane suddenly boring out of the cloud, a bright red flower of fire suddenly erupted from the bank. She heard no explosion over the roar of her engine, and it took her a moment to realize what had happened. Josephine’s breath caught in her throat. Steve Stevens had smashed into the mountain. His biplane was burning, and he was dead.

Two terrible thoughts pierced her heart.

Stevens’s twin-motor speedster – Marco’s amazing big and fast heavy-lifting machine – was out of the race, leaving Joe Mudd’s slow Liberator her only competition. She hated herself for thinking that way; not only was it uncharitable and unworthy but she realized that even though she disliked Stevens, he had been part of her tiny band of cross-country aviators.

Her second terrible thought was harder to bear. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin would probably have won if Marco hadn’t caused damage to his Curtiss Pusher.

That night in Willcox, Arizona Territory, having stopped in Lordsburg only long enough for gas and oil, Josephine overheard Marion tell Isaac Bell, “Whiteway is pleased as punch.”

“He’s gotten what he wanted,” Isaac replied. “A neck and neck flying race between America’s plucky Sweetheart of the Air and a union man on a slow machine.”

EUSTACE WEED’S WORST NIGHTMARE came true in Tucson. The race was held up by a ferocious sandstorm that half buried the machines. After they got them dug out and cleaned up, Andy Moser gave him the afternoon off to shoot pool downtown. There, Eustace encountered a Yaqui Indian, who tried to take his money shooting eight-ball. The Indian was good, very good indeed, and it took Eustace Weed most of the afternoon to take the Yaqui’s money and that of his friends, who were laying side bets that the Tucson Indian would beat the kid from Chicago. When Eustace left the pool hall at suppertime, the Yaqui named him “the Chicago Kid,” and he felt like he was on top of the world until a fellow waiting on the sidewalk said, “You’re on, kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Still got what we gave you in Chicago?”

“What?”

“Did you lose it?”

“No.”

“Let me see it.”

Reluctantly, Eustace Weed produced the little leather sack. The guy shook out the copper tube, inspected that the seals were intact, and handed it back. “We’ll be touch. . soon.”

Eustace Weed said, “Do you understand what this will do to a flying machine?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s not like your motor quitting in your auto. He’s up in the sky.”

“That makes sense, it being a flying machine.”

“Water in the gas will stop a motor dead. If that happens when he’s way high up, the driver might be able to volplane down safely. Might. But if his motor stops dead when he’s lower down, his machine will smash, and he will die.”

“Do you understand what will happen to Daisy Ramsey if you don’t do what you’re told?”

Eustace Weed could not meet the guy’s eye. He looked down. “Yes.”

“Enough said.”

Eustace Weed said nothing.

“Understand?”

“I understand.”

37

“TEXAS” WALT HATFIELD showed up suddenly on a thundery morning in Yuma, Arizona Territory. The town sat on the banks of the recently dammed Colorado River. Across the wide water lay California. The racers were itching to make Palm Springs by nightfall. But it was thunderstorm season in California, and the locals advised waiting a few hours for the risk of lightning strikes and torrential rains to diminish. The machines were tied down under canvas, and the support trains were still in the rail yard.

“Does Mr. Van Dorn know you’re here?” Bell asked, knowing the Texan’s penchant for bulling off on his own.

“The range boss ordered me to hightail it here and report in person.”

“You have something on Frost?”

Texas Walt shoved his J.B. back on this head. “Ran down his Thomas Flyer outside of Tuscon. How the heck he drove it that far, I don’t know. But neither hide nor hair of him or his boys. I had a strong inkling they caught a train. Found out yesterday they rode out in style, having reserved a stateroom on the Limited.”

“Which way?”

“California.”

“So why did Mr. Van Dorn send you here?”

Texas Walt grinned, a blaze of startling white teeth in a stern countenance as sun-browned as a saddle. “’Cause he had every reason to. Isaac, old son, wait ’til you clap eyes on who I brung with me.”

“There’s only two men I want to clap eyes on: Harry Frost. Or Marco Celere, back from the dead.”

“Damn! You are always one step ahead. How in heck did you know?”

“Know what?”

“I brung Marco Celere.”

“Alive?”

“Darned tootin’, alive. Got him from some Southern Pacific rail dicks I’m acquainted with. They caught a hobo hopping off a freight who swore up, down, and sideways that he’s part of the air race. Claimed to know Josephine personally and demanded to see the Van Dorn detectives guarding her. As that information is not printed in the newspapers, the boys believed him enough to wire me.”

“Where is he?”

“Got him right in the cookhouse. The man’s starving.”

Isaac Bell charged into the galley car and saw a ragged stranger, forking eggs and bacon off a plate with one hand and stuffing bread in his mouth with the other. He had greasy black hair, parted by a red scar that traveled from his brow across the crown of his skull, another red scar on his forearm, and intensely bright eyes.

“Are you Marco Celere?”

“That is my name, sir,” he replied, speaking with an Italian accent somewhat heavier than Danielle Di Vecchio’s though not as difficult to understand as Josephine had led Bell to believe. “Where is Josephine?”

“Where have you been?”

Celere smiled. “I wish I could answer that.”

“You’re going to have to answer that before I let you within a mile of Josephine. Who are you?”

“I am Marco Celere. I came awake two weeks ago in Canada. I had no idea who I was or how I got there. Then, gradually, my memory returned. In tiny bits. A trickle to start, then a flood. I remember my aeroplanes first. Then I saw a newspaper account about the Whiteway Cup Air Race. In it, I read, I have not only one but two machines, my heavy biplane and my swift monoplano, and suddenly it all came back.”

“Where in Canada?”

“A farm. To the south of Montreal.”

“Any idea how you got there?”

“I do not honestly know. The people who saved me found me by the train tracks. They assumed that I rode on a freight train.”

“What people?”

“A kindly farm family. They nursed me through winter into spring before I began to remember.”

Challenging the man who Danielle had called a thief and a confidence man, who had changed his name from Prestogiacomo to Celere while fleeing his past, and who James Dashwood suspected might have murdered Danielle’s father in San Francisco and disguised the crime as a suicide, Bell kept peppering him with questions.

“Any idea how you happened to get amnesia?”

“I know precisely how.” Celere ran his fingers along the scar on his scalp. “I was hunting with Harry Frost. He shot me.”

“What brings you to the Arizona Territory?”

“I have come to help Josephine win the race in my flying machine. May I see her, please?”

Bell asked, “When did you last read a newspaper?”

“I saw a scrap of one last week in the Kansas City yards.”

“Are you aware that your heavy biplane smashed?”

“No! Can it be fixed?”

“It ran into a mountain.”

“That is most disturbing. What of the driver?”

“What you would expect.”

Celere put down his fork. “That is terrible. I am so sorry. I hope it was not the fault of the machine.”

“The machine was as worn out as the rest of them. It’s a long race.”

“But a magnificent challenge,” said Celere.

“I should also warn you,” said Bell, watching his eyes closely, “that Josephine has remarried.”

Celere surprised him. He would have thought Celere would be troubled to learn that his girlfriend had married. Instead, he said, “Wonderful! I am so happy for her! But what of her marriage to Frost?”

“Annulled.”

“Good. That is only right. He was a terrible husband to her. To whom has she been married?”

“Preston Whiteway.”

Celere clapped his hands in delight. “Ah! Perfect!”

“Why is that perfect?”

“She is a racer. He is a race promoter. A marriage made in Heaven. I can’t wait to congratulate him and wish her happiness.”

Bell glanced at Texas Walt, who was listening at the door, then asked the Italian inventor, “Would you care to get cleaned up first? I’ll find you a razor and some fresh clothes. There’s a washroom in the back of the hangar car.”

“Grazie! Thank you. I really must look a sight.”

Bell exchanged glances with Texas Walt again and answered with a smile that didn’t light his eyes. “You look pretty much like a fellow who crossed the continent in a freight car.”

Bell and Hatfield led him to the washroom and gave him a towel and razor.

“Thank you, thank you. Could I ask one more favor?”

“What would you like?”

“Would there be some brilliantine?” He ran his fingers through his dirty hair. “That I might smooth my hair?”

“I’ll rustle some up,” said Texas Walt.

“Thank you, sir. And some mustache wax? It will be wonderful to be myself again.”

“LIKE A FELLOW WHO CROSSED the continent in a freight car?” Texas Walt echoed Isaac Bell’s assessment with a dubious grin.

Bell grinned back. “What do you think?”

“Looked more to me like the man rode the cushions,” said Hatfield, using the hobo expression for buying a ticket for a parlor car. “Doubt he hit the rails ’til the last hundred miles.”

“Exactly,” said Bell, who had ridden many a freight train while investigating in disguise. “He’s not dirty enough.”

“Ah suppose some lonely ranch wife might have sluiced him off in her horse trough.”

“Might have.”

Texas Walt rolled a cigarette, exhaled blue smoke, and remarked, “Can’t help wonderin’ what Miss Josephine is gonna think. Suppose she’d have agreed to marry Whiteway if she had known Celere was alive?”

“I guess that depends on what they meant to each other,” answered Bell.

“What do we do with him, boss?”

“Let’s see what he’s up to,” answered Bell, wondering whether in Marco Celere’s miraculous return lay the explanation for Harry Frost’s angry You don’t know what they were up to.

MARCO CELERE EMERGED from Bell’s hangar car bathed, shaved, and brilliantined. His black hair gleamed, his cheeks were smooth, his mustache curled at the tips. Bell’s own mustache twitched in the thinnest of smiles when Texas Walt glanced his way. The sharp-eyed Texan had noticed, as had he, that Celere’s clean-shaven cheeks were slightly paler in color than his nose and chin. The difference was almost imperceptible, but they were looking for false notes, and there it was, an indication that he had until recently worn a beard.

Josephine expressed astonishment that Celere was alive. She said she had never given up hope that he had somehow survived. She took his hand and said, “Oh, you poor thing,” when he told his story. She seemed happy to see him, Bell thought, but she turned quickly to the business of the race.

“You couldn’t have come at a better time, Marco. I need help keeping the aeroplane running. It’s getting pretty worn down. I’ll have my husband put you on the payroll.”

“There is no need for that,” Celere replied gallantly, “I will work gratis. After all, it is in my interest, too, that my machine win the race.”

“Then you better get to work,” said Bell. “Weather’s clearing. Weiner of Accounting just announced we’re taking off for Palm Springs.”

MINDFUL THAT ISAAC BELL was watching him like a hawk, Marco Celere waited patiently to have a private conversation with Josephine. He made sure he was never alone with her until after she arrived at Palm Springs. Only the next morning, while they fueled the machine for the short flight to Los Angeles, did he dare to chance speaking. They were alone, pouring gasoline into the overhead gravity tank, while the mechanicians joined the police in clearing spectators from the field.

Josephine spoke first. “Who died in the fire?”

“I found a body in the hobo jungle. Now Platov doesn’t exist.”

“Dead already?”

“Of course. A poor old man. They die all the time. What did you think?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Maybe married life confuses you.”

“What do you mean?”

“What is it like?” Marco teased. “Being Mrs. Preston Whiteway?”

“I postponed my ‘honeymoon’ until after the race. You know that. I told you I would.”

Marco shrugged. “This is like opera buffa.”

“I don’t know anything about opera.”

“Opera buffa is the funny kind. Like vaudeville comics.”

“This is not funny to me, Marco.”

“To me, it’s worth getting shot.”

“How? Why?”

“It’s just that if something were to happen to Preston Whiteway, you would inherit his newspaper empire.”

“I don’t want his empire. I just want to fly aeroplanes and win this race.” She searched his face, and added, “And be with you.”

“I suppose that I should feel grateful you still feel that way.”

“What would happen to Preston?”

“Oh, now Mr. Whiteway is ‘Preston’?”

“I can’t call my husband Mr. Whiteway.”

“No, I suppose you can’t.”

“Marco, what is it? What are you getting at?”

“I just wonder, will you keep helping me?”

“Of course. . What did you mean, if something happens to Preston?”

“Such as Harry Frost, your insanely jealous former husband, murdering your new husband.”

“What are you saying?”

Marco reached over and turned back the sleeve of her blouse, uncovering the bandaged bullet wound on her forearm. “Nothing you don’t already know about the man.”

38

A LOUD, BRIGHT CARNIVAL pitched its tents near Dominguez Field, just south of Los Angeles, and was doing a roaring business from the spillover of the quarter-million spectators who thronged to cheer the arrival of the last two contestants for the Whiteway Cup and send them off to Fresno in the morning.

Eustace Weed was sick with fear over the impending order to contaminate Isaac Bell’s aeroplane fuel and had no desire to go to a carnival. But Mr. Bell insisted that “all work and no play made Jack a dull boy.” He backed up this observation with five dollars’ spending money and strict orders not to bring any change back from the midway. A friend of Mr. Bell’s, a guy Eustace’s age named Dash who’d been hanging around, placing a lot of bets on the race, ever since Illinois, walked over with Eustace from the rail yard and promised they’d meet up later to walk back to the support train.

Eustace won a teddy bear by knocking over wooden milk bottles with a baseball. He was debating mailing it to Daisy or delivering it in person – as if somehow everything would turn out fine – when the toothless old barker who handed him his prize whispered hoarsely, “You’re on, Eustace.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow morning. Drop it in Bell’s gasoline tank right before he takes off.”

“What if he sees me?”

“Palm it when you fill the tank so he don’t.”

“But he’s sharp as all heck. He might see me.”

The toothless old guy patted Eustace’s shoulder in a friendly way and said, “Listen, Eustace, I don’t know what this is about and I don’t want to. All I know is, the fellows who told me to pass you the message are as bad as they get. So I’m advising you, whoever this sharp Bell is, he better not see you.”

The carnival had a Ferris wheel in the middle. It looked eighty feet tall, and Eustace wondered would they leave Daisy alone if he rode to the top and killed himself by jumping off. Just then, Dash showed up.

“What happened? Lose all your money? You look miserable.”

“I’m O.K.”

“Hey, you won a teddy bear.”

“For my girl.”

“What’s her name?”

“Daisy.”

“Say, if you married her, she’d be Daisy Weed,” Dash joked like it was a new idea. Then he asked if Eustace was hungry and insisted on buying him a sausage and a beer that went down like sawdust and vinegar.

TWO HARD-FACED MEN with hooded eyes were waiting for Isaac Bell outside the Eagle Special’s hangar car. They were dressed in slouch hats, shirts with dirty collars, four-in-hand ties loose at the neck, and dark sack suits bulging with sidearms. One man had his arm in a sling that was noticeably fresher and whiter than his shirt, as was the bandage on his companion’s forehead. Josephine’s detective-mechanicians were eyeing them closely, scrutiny the two men returned with sullen bravado.

“Remember us, Mr. Bell?”

“Griggs and Bottomley. You look like you tangled with a locomotive.”

“Feel that way, too,” Griggs admitted.

Bell shook their hands, taking Bottomley’s left in deference to his sling, and told the detective-mechanicians, “They’re O.K., boys, Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley, Southern Pacific rail dicks.”

The Van Dorns looked down their noses at the railroad police, who commonly represented the bottom of the private detective heap, until Bell added, “If you remember the Glendale wreck, Griggs and Bottomley were instrumental in getting to the bottom of it. What’s up, boys?”

“We had a hunch you’d be the Van Dorn ramrodding the Josephine case.”

Bell nodded. “Not something I want to read in the newspaper, but I am. And I have a funny feeling, based on the evidence of recent ministrations by the medicos, that you’re going to tell me you ran into Harry Frost.”

“Ed plugged him dead center,” said Griggs. “Gut-shot him. Didn’t even slow him down.”

“He wears a ‘bulletproof ’ vest.”

“Heard of them,” said Griggs. “I didn’t know they worked.”

“We do now,” observed Bottomley.

“Where did this happen?”

“Burbank. Dispatcher wired us someone was busting into a maintenance shop. Thieving louse was just piling into a motortruck when we got there. Louse opened fire. We shot back. He walked straight at us, walloped me in the head, and shot Tom in the arm.”

“By the time we could see straight,” said Bottomley, “he was gone. Found the motortruck in the morning. Empty.”

“What did he steal?”

“Five fifty-pound crates of dynamite, some blasting caps, and a coil of fuse,” answered Griggs.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Bell. “He loves his dynamite.”

“Sure, Mr. Bell. But what has Tom and me racking our brains is how’s he’s fixing to blow up a flying machine.”

“The race is headed to Fresno in the morning,” answered Bell. “I’ll telephone Superintendent Watt, tell him what you boys turned up, and ask him to set the entire California division of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police to inspecting main-line bridges and trestles for sabotage.”

“But flying machines don’t use bridges.”

“Their support trains do,” Bell explained. “And just between us, at this point in the race, after four thousand miles, the mechanicians and spare parts in their hangar cars are all that’s keeping them in the air. By any chance did you wound him at all?”

“I think I creased his leg when I went down. Wouldn’t be surprised if he limps a mite.”

“Well done,” said Isaac Bell.

EUSTACE WEED DECIDED that since he had no other choice than to do this terrible thing to Isaac Bell, he would at least do it right so nothing bad happened to Daisy by mistake. That would be the worst, to get caught doing the terrible thing but also have Daisy hurt.

To steady his nerves, he pretended that he was back in Tucson, hustling hick-town pool players in their hick-town parlor. One thing he knew for sure: if you wanted to win at pool, you had to trust yourself. At the end of the game, the dough was won by the guy who didn’t lose his nerve.

He snugged the copper tube inside his left hand and kept it hidden while he poured the strained gasoline – and – castor oil mix into the American Eagle’s tank right under Isaac Bell’s nose. That way, he wouldn’t look suspicious pulling it from a pocket. Andy came over to report that the machine was ready. Bell turned away to speak to Andy. Eustace reached for the gas cap to screw it on with his right hand.

Bell said, “Andy, let’s check the control post again.”

Eustace passed his left hand over the open mouth of the tank.

Isaac Bell’s thumb and forefinger closed around his wrist, hard as a steel shackle.

“Eustace. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

EUSTACE WEED OPENED HIS MOUTH. He could not speak. Tears welled in his eyes.

Bell watched him sternly. When he spoke, the chief investigator’s voice was glacial: “I’ll tell you what happened. You nod. Understand?”

Eustace was trembling.

“Understand?” Bell repeated.

Eustace nodded.

Bell let go his wrist, palming the copper tube as he did, shook it speculatively, then tossed it to Andy Moser, who took one look and glowered, “When the gas melts the wax, what’s inside leaks out. What is it? Water?”

Eustace Weed bit his lip and nodded.

Bell pulled a notepad from his coat. “Do you recognize this fellow?”

Eustace Weed blinked at a drawing like you’d see in the newspaper.

“A saloonkeeper in Chicago. I don’t know his name.”

“How about this one?”

“He worked for the saloonkeeper. He took me to him.”

“And this one?”

“He’s the other one who took me to see him.”

“How about this man?”

Bell showed him a sketch of a grim-faced man, more frightening than the others, who looked like a prizefighter who had never lost a bout. “No. I never saw him.”

“This fellow is a Van Dorn detective who has lived for the past two weeks across the hall from Miss Daisy Ramsey and her mother. He shares his rooms with another fellow, a bigger fellow. When one has to go out, the other is there, across the hall. When Daisy goes to work at the telephone exchange, a Van Dorn man watches the sidewalk and another watches the telephone exchange. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Eustace?”

“Daisy is safe?”

“Daisy is safe. Now, tell me everything. Quickly.”

“How do you know her name?”

“I asked you her name back in Topeka, Kansas. You told me, confirming what we were already turning up in Chicago. It’s our town.”

“But you can’t watch over her forever.”

“We don’t have to.” Bell held up the pictures again. “These two will be locked back in Joliet prison to resume serving well-deserved twenty-year sentences. This saloonkeeper is about to go out of business and open a small dry-goods store in Seattle, a city to which he is moving for his health.”

ON A REMOTE STRETCH of dun-colored ranchland between Los Angeles and Fresno, the Southern Pacific West Side Line that the air racers were supposed to follow crossed the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka amp; Santa Fe. Intersecting at that same point were local short-line railroads that served the raisin growers and cattlemen of the San Joaquin Valley. The resultant junction of rails, switches, and underpasses was so confusing that dispatchers and train conductors called it the Snake Dance. The Whiteway Cup Air Race stewards had marked the correct route with a conspicuous canvas arrow.

Dave Mayhew, Harry Frost’s telegrapher, climbed down from a pole and read aloud his Morse alphabet transcriptions.

“Josephine’s way in the lead. Joe Mudd had trouble getting off the ground. Now he’s stuck in a cotton field in Tipton.”

“Where’s her support train?” asked Frost.

“Keeping pace. Right under her.”

“Where’s Isaac Bell?”

“The Tulare dispatcher heard his motor sputtering when he saw Bell and Josephine fly over. No one’s spotted him since. The last dispatcher who spotted her said Josephine was flying alone.”

“Where is Bell’s support train?”

“Sidelined north of Tulare – probably where he went down.”

Harry Frost pulled his watch from his vest and confirmed the time. By this hour, the water in his gas should have made Isaac Bell smash.

“Get the auto,” he told Mayhew.

With decent luck, Bell was dead. But, at the very least, the Van Dorn posed no threat to Frost’s plan to shoot Josephine out of the sky and wreck Whiteway’s support train.

To Stotts, Frost said, “Move the pointer.”

Mike Stotts ran onto the Southern Pacific main line, rolled up the canvas arrow pointing north and unrolled it pointing northwest up the short line that angled toward the dry hills that rimmed the valley to the west. Then he threw the switch to divert Josephine’s train in the same direction.

Dave Mayhew drove a brand-new Thomas Flyer onto the short line. Frost and Stotts climbed in, and the three raced northwest.

39

THE ONLY NOISE ISAAC BELL HEARD was the wind humming in the wing stays as he volplaned his yellow machine in gently descending circles. Beef cattle grazed peacefully under him, and a flock of white pelicans stayed on course, proof that he was passing over the ground as silently as a condor.

A storm from the distant Pacific was surmounting the coastal mountains, and the shadow cast by his machine flickered and faded as the sun was covered and uncovered by cloud fragments racing ahead of the heavy thunderheads. As his shadow crept across the rolling hills in lazy curves, Bell maneuvered carefully so as not to let it fall on the Thomas Flyer racing ahead of a dust trail on the short-line tracks.

There were three men in the Thomas. Bell was too high in the air to identify them, even with his field glasses. But the massive bulk of the figure hunched in the backseat of the open auto, and the canvas arrow that had been shifted away from the main line, coupled with poor Eustace’s attempt to sabotage his engine, told him it had to be Harry Frost.

He had spotted the dust trail ten miles after he followed the canvas arrow at the Snake Dance junction and immediately shut off the noisy Gnome. Josephine was safe on the ground thirty miles back, fuming at the delay despite an official time-out sanctioned by Preston Whiteway to give Bell the opportunity to capture Frost.

Bell turned back toward the junction and restarted the Gnome. When he saw the long yellow line that was the Josephine Special, he swooped down to the train, skimmed the roof of the hangar car, which bristled with rifle-toting detectives, turned around again, and led the train after the Thomas, rising to only five hundred feet above the locomotive.

After ten minutes he thought that they would have caught up, but the tracks were empty and the dust trail gone. A broad dry creek appeared ahead, a dip in the rolling land, as the tracks began veering alongside the foothills of the Coast Range mountains. It was bridged by a long wooden trestle.

The tall detective held his control wheel in one hand and scrutinized the trestle with his field glasses. The maze of timbers would offer excellent cover for men with rifles. And they could have hidden the Thomas in its shadows. But he saw neither the men nor their auto. Suddenly he heard two sharp explosions – louder than the roar of the Gnome. He knew they weren’t gunshots. Nor had they come from the trestle but from directly beneath him, as if from the locomotive.

The big black Atlantic slowed abruptly. Its high drive wheels ground sparks from the rails as the engineer fought to stop his long train as fast as he could. The loud reports, Bell realized, had been caused by torpedoes – detonating caps of fulminate of mercury attached to the rails with lead straps to signal trouble ahead. When a locomotive passed over them, they exploded loudly enough for the engineer and fireman to hear over the roar of the firebox and the thunder of the steam.

Bell saw white smoke spewing from the brake shoes under every car, and the train clashed and banged to a halt halfway across the trestle. Instantly, the locomotive emitted five puffs of steam from its whistle. Five whistles signaled a brakeman to jump from the rear car – Preston Whiteway’s private carriage – and run back along the tracks waving a red flag to warn trains steaming behind it that the special had stopped suddenly for an emergency and was blocking the tracks. By then Bell had overflown the train and the trestle.

He saw the glitter of sunlight on glass.

In the same instant, he spotted the Thomas parked in the shadow of a rail-maintenance shack. The sun flashed again on a telescope sight. He counted two rifles braced on the roof of the shack, spitting red fire.

It was a brilliantly laid trap – the train stopped as a distraction, the rock-steady shooting position, the shock of total surprise. And Bell knew that if he were the young aviatrix whose name was painted on the side of his yellow monoplane, Frost would have killed her in the second hail of fire when she veered away instinctively, thus presenting a bigger target broadside.

Isaac Bell dove straight at the shack, sheered away at the last moment to aim clear of his propeller, and emptied his Remington’s five-shot magazine so fast that the sound of the shots blended together in a roar like a cannon. Circling up and back, he saw that he had hit the gunmen to either side of Frost. He extracted the empty magazine, slipped a full one in its place, and dove again.

Frost did not shoot at him. Bell wondered if he had hit Frost, too, and wounded him too badly to fight. But, no, Frost was running to the Thomas. He cranked the motor, jumped in, and drove onto the tracks. Then, to Bell’s puzzlement, he jumped from the auto and knelt briefly beside the rails.

Frost jumped back on the Thomas and drove toward the hills.

Less than ten seconds had expired since the shooting started. Detectives were still leaping from the hangar car. Bell banked hard to chase after the Thomas. But as the Eagle tipped on its side, Bell’s experience with Harry Frost’s relentless cruelty made him look carefully where Frost had knelt.

He saw smoke, a thin white trail of smoke.

Without hesitation, Isaac Bell rammed his blip switch, shoved his wheel forward, and dropped the Eagle toward the tracks. In the midst of the smoke, traveling along the rail, was a moving stud of red fire. Harry Frost had knelt on the rails and coolly lit a fuse – the fuse he had stolen from the Burbank maintenance shop along with detonators and dynamite.

He had packed the trestle with explosives, Bell realized. The attack he had planned had been twofold: shoot Josephine out of the sky, and blow Preston Whiteway’s train to Kingdom Come – along with every Van Dorn riding on it.

Bell forced the Eagle down and straddled the rails with the skids. He hit so hard, the machine bounced and tried to rise again. It would have been safer to pour on the power and take her up again, but there wasn’t a moment to lose. He drove the machine down hard and felt the skids shatter on the crossties. Splintering wood, shrieking metallic protest, the Eagle slid along the railroad tracks. Bell leaped and hit the ground running.

The smoke was racing ahead of him, picking up speed as it closed with the trestle. Bell ran faster, gaining on it, and was within yards of stomping it out when it slipped over the lip of the gorge and under the trestle where he couldn’t reach.

“Back your engine!” he shouted, running onto the trestle. “Back off the bridge.”

There was no time for that. He saw the engineer gaping from his cab and his detectives running to help him, not realizing the danger. He saw Dashwood among them.

“Dash!” he shouted. “There’s a detonator fuse under the tracks. Shoot it.”

Bell climbed over the edge and down through the wooden timbers beneath the track. He saw the fuse strung timber to timber, burning brightly. Dash was quick – he, too, went over the side, scrambled among the timbers, and spotted the dot of fire fifty feet away. Clinging to a timber with one arm, the young detective drew his long-barreled Colt, took aim, and fired. The bullet threw splinters. The fuse kept burning. Dash fired again. The fuse leaped and jumped, and kept burning.

Bell pulled himself along under the tracks, jumping from timber to timber. Ahead, in the shadow of the locomotive, he saw bundled dynamite – dozens and dozens of sticks, enough to destroy the trestle, the train, and everyone on it. Dash fired again. The fuse fire danced on.

Isaac Bell leaped onto a horizontal cross timber, drew his Browning smoothly from his coat, and fired once.

The dancing flame vanished. A wisp of smoke stood in its place, wavered in a puff of wind, then drifted away as if the fuse had been a candle snuffed out to end a pleasant evening.

Bell scrambled back up on the tracks and ran to the train to issue orders.

Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians were good men but city men, next to useless out of doors. “Crank Whiteway’s roadster,” he told them, “and run it down the ramp. Defuse the dynamite under the bridge. Then fix the skids so my machine can fly.

“Dash! You cover the boys working on my machine. Shoot Frost in the head if the sidewinder doubles back.” He gestured Dash closer, and added under his breath, “Don’t let Celere near my machine. Oh, by the way, I know your mother gave you that Colt. But I would take it kindly if you would allow my gunsmith to fix you up with a proper Browning.

“Texas Walt! You come with me!”

Bell jumped behind the steering wheel of Preston Whiteway’s yellow Rolls-Royce. Walt Hatfield piled in next to him with a couple of lever-action Winchesters, and they drove off the trestle and raced up the railroad tracks toward the foothills of the Coast Range.

After three miles of the grade steepening and scrub growth and clumps of low trees intruding on the grassland, they found the Thomas Flyer stopped in the middle of the tracks with two tires punctured by loose railroad spikes. Texas Walt spotted Frost’s trail, first from loose ballast where he had run down the railroad embankment, then from his trampling through the knee-high grass.

Bell covered the thickets and rock outcroppings ahead with a Winchester while Hatfield loped from a scuff in the sand to a bent blade of grass to a broken twig. Bell himself was an experienced tracker, but Texas Walt could read the ground like the Comanches who had raised him.

Above the hills, thunder muttered and lightning flickered inside the swelling storm clouds. The wind puffed cold in their faces, then hot.

A blue jay bounced up from a thicket of evergreen oaks a half mile ahead.

It was mighty long range for a rifle, but Bell snapped, “Down!”

A shot echoed off the hills. Walt crumpled beside him.

40

BELL CUT TO THE RIGHT, seeking the shelter of a boulder. A.45-70 slug parted the air six inches from his cheek. Instead of diving for cover, he bounded past the boulder and into a narrow arroyo.

He raced silently up the dry creek bed, one eye ahead, the other guiding his boots around anything that would make noise. The arroyo veered more to the right – farther from Frost – even as it climbed the steepening slope. Bell put on speed. He ran flat out for a full mile, climbing all the distance. When he finally stopped to catch his breath, it was where a ledge would allow him to survey the ground he had put behind him. Slithering flat on his belly, he edged forward until he could see the back of the thicket from which Frost had fired.

Now half a mile below him, it covered nearly an acre of the hillside. Frost could be hidden anywhere inside it or he might have retreated up the slope and could now be more at Bell’s level. If he were smart, he would have withdrawn. But Bell was betting that Frost was making a big-game hunter’s mistake by staying still or moving only a short distance to lay another ambush for his quarry. Most animals ran when hunted. Some, like panther and elephant, might occasionally charge. Very few slipped past to attack from behind.

Bell chose the route for his attack down a shallow arroyo and past a thicket. He eased back from the ledge to stay out of sight and started down. He was silent and he was quick, loath to give Frost time to reconsider his position. When the arroyo grew too shallow to hide him, he crawled to the nearest thicket and kept going.

The leaden arch of sky was pierced suddenly by jagged lightning.

Drops of rain scattered the dust.

Again the wind rattled the hard-leafed chaparral, first hot, then cold.

Suddenly he skidded off balance. He kicked a rock, which rolled noisily downhill.

A shot cracked, the bullet kicking dust fifteen feet below him. Bell instantly grabbed another rock and threw it far to his right. It landed with a clatter that drew more fire. Let Frost wonder which rock had been accidentally dislodged and which thrown. Bell started down again. The location from where Frost had fired his rifle was almost exactly where Bell had guessed. He was staying put in the thicket, which was now less than three hundred yards below him. But now Frost knew to look behind him.

Without warning, he exploded into action, shoving out of the dense undergrowth running for the cover of a depression in the land that looked to Bell like the mouth of a small canyon. Frost was limping, as Tom Griggs had speculated, but still covering ground at a startling speed for a man his size. Bell snapped a shot at him that missed. He levered a fresh round into the Winchester and stood erect to deliberately line up a second shot, leading the running man and calculating the effect of the rising wind over the two hundred yards that separated them. His rifle spoke.

Frost flung his arms high. His Marlin went flying. The distance was too long to hear him yell, but Bell thought he had hurt him badly until he saw Frost scoop his fallen rifle off the ground and disappear into the canyon.

Isaac Bell ran down the slope, bounding from hummock to hummock, leaping brush and boulders. He lost his footing, pitched to the ground, rolled on his shoulder, and sprang to his feet again, still running and clutching his Winchester.

He sensed more than saw a flicker of movement at the mouth of the canyon and dove headlong to the ground. A pistol slug whistled through the air he had just vacated. He tucked the Winchester tight to his chest, rolled, and this time when he sprang to his feet he came up firing, levering slug after slug into the breech, spraying a deadly fusillade that sent Frost in retreat.

For some reason, Frost wasn’t using his Marlin. Bell guessed that his Winchester shot that had set it flying had damaged it, in which case Frost was down to sidearms. He burst into the canyon, which was no wider than a town house but appeared to bore deeply into the hillside. Thick brush clogged the mouth. Bell pushed through thorny chaparral. Pistol shots booming close at hand revealed Frost, crouching and firing his snub-nosed Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver with which he had almost killed Archie Abbott. The range was too long for the sawed-off barrel. The manstoppers flew wildly, scattering splinters of wood.

Bell tried to fire back. His Winchester was empty.

Frost charged, plowing through the brush like a buffalo, triggering his heavy pistol as he halved the range and burst from the thicket. It was Bell’s first close look at him. One eye was cloudy, the socket scarred where Bell’s Remington rifle shots had hurled stone chips in his face at the Chicago armory. The ear Bell had winged was a ragged appendage. The jaw Archie had broken was misshapen. But his good eye burned hot as a gasoline fire, and he ran with the unstoppable gait of a locomotive.

Bell dropped to one knee, pulled his throwing knife from his boot, and flung it hard. It slid between the bones of Frost’s forearm, and the deadly Webley-Fosbery fell from his convulsing fingers. Before it hit the ground, Frost pulled out a pocket pistol with his left hand.

Bell drew his Browning and triggered it twice. Their weapons echoed in unison. Frost’s vest deflected both of Bell’s bullets. One of Frost’s shots fanned Bell’s cheek, the other plucked his sleeve. Frost’s pocket pistol jammed, and he drew his own Browning, a far deadlier threat than the pistol. Bell ran straight at him and shot the Browning out of Frost’s hand. Frost threw a roundhouse left, spraying Bell with blood from his skewered forearm.

Bell deflected some of the impact with his shoulder. But the giant’s punch rocked him to the core, knocked him halfway to his knees. White flashes stormed before his eyes. His hands felt heavy as lead. He sensed a second pile-driver punch coming at him, rolled with it, and hurled his own punch, aiming for the jawbone that Archie had broken.

His tightly clenched fist connected, staggering the giant and drawing a grunt of pain. But Frost whirled around and backhanded him with a blow that knocked the detective to the ground. Frost picked up his ruined rifle and raised it to the sky like a long steel club. Isaac Bell whipped his derringer from his hat.

“Drop it!” he said. “You’re a dead man.”

Frost swung the rifle.

Bell squeezed the trigger.

A blaze of light and an explosion fifty times louder than a pistol shot sent the rifle pinwheeling forty feet. Frost was smashed flat on the ground. Six feet away, Isaac Bell remained on his feet, ears ringing, staring down at his fallen adversary in astonishment. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. Frost’s face was black, his beard burned, his shirt and trousers smoldering, the soles blown off his boots.

Life was leaking from Frost’s eyes. He sucked air through his charred lips. But his voice was still strong, harsh and thick with scorn. “You didn’t get me. Lightning bolt hit my rifle.”

“I had you dead to rights,” answered Bell. “The lightning just happened to get you first.”

Frost croaked bitter laughter.

“Is that why Van Dorns never give up? You got weather gods on your side?”

Isaac Bell gazed down triumphantly at the dying criminal. “I didn’t need weather gods,” he said quietly. “I had Wally Laughlin on my side.”

“Who the hell is Wally Laughlin?”

“He was a newsboy. You murdered him and two of his friends when you dynamited the Dearborn Street news depot.”

“Newsboy?. . Oh yeah, I remember.” He shuddered with pain and forced out another jibe. “I’ll hear about it in Hell. How old was he?”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve?” Frost lay back. His voice grew weak. “Twelve was my grand year. I’d been a little runt getting used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Then all of a sudden I started growing and growing, and everything went my way. Won my first fight. Got my first gang. Killed my first man – twenty years old, he was, full grown.”

A hideous parody of a smile twisted Frost’s burnt lips.

“Poor little Wally,” he muttered sarcastically. “Who knows what the little bastard could have made of himself.”

“He made a memory of himself,” said Isaac Bell.

“How’d he do that?”

“He had a kind soul.”

BELL STOOD UP and gathered his weapons.

Harry Frost called after him. Suddenly there was fear in his voice. “Are you leaving me here to die alone?”

“You’ve left crowds to die alone.”

“What if I told you something you don’t know about Marco Celere?”

Bell said, “Marco Celere showed up in Yuma three days ago, fit as a fiddle. You ran from the only murder you didn’t commit.”

Frost levered himself up on one elbow and shot back, “I know that.”

Intrigued, Bell knelt beside the dying man, watching his hands for a hidden knife or another pocket pistol stashed in his smoldering garments. “How?”

“Marco Celere showed up at Belmont Park six weeks ago.”

“Celere gave me the impression he was in Canada six weeks ago.”

“He was right in the middle of the race,” Frost crowed. “Prancing around the infield like he owned it. You damned Van Dorns never knew.”

“Platov!” said Bell. “Of course!” Marco Celere was the saboteur, though proving it in a court of law would be next to impossible.

“A little late on that one, Mr. Detective,” Frost sneered.

“How did you happen to see him?”

“He spotted me one night I was trying to get near Josephine’s machine. Walked up to me, big as life, and offered a deal.”

“I’d have thought you’d kill him on sight,” said Bell.

“You know that sawed-off coach gun the Italians call a lupa? He had it pointed at my head. Both hammers on full cock.”

“What deal?”

“Should I give you a gift for little Wally?” Frost asked mockingly. “Information you can use to get Celere? You think if I do you a favor, they’ll be nice to me in Hell?”

“I don’t see you getting a better chance than this one. What was the deal?”

“If I held off killing Josephine until after she won the race, then Marco would take me to a place where I could hide out in luxury for the rest of my life.”

“Where would this paradise be?” Bell asked skeptically.

“North Africa. Libya. The Turkish colonies that Italy is going to win in North Africa. He said we’d be safe as houses and live like kings.”

“Sounds like con-man palaver.”

“No. Celere knows his business. I’ve been over there, I seen it with my own eyes. The Ottomans – the Turks – they’re on their last leg and Italy’s so poor and crowded, they’re itching to grab their colonies. So Celere’s setting himself up to be the Italian Army’s gold-haired boy by supplying aerial war machines. He’ll be the national hero when Italy beats Turkey with his machine-gun aeroplanes and bomb carriers. But he knows he’s got to prove himself. They’ll only buy his machines if Josephine wins the race.”

“Why didn’t you take him up on it?”

Rage stiffened Frost’s ravaged face. “I told you, I’m not a chump. If he was so fixed there in North Africa that he could protect me, then he’d hold the key to my cell. I might as well be back in the orphanage.”

“Why didn’t he blow your head off with his lupa?”

“Celere’s like a juggler, always tossing a bunch of balls in the air. He bet on you protecting her and hoped I would change my mind-and that I would kill Whiteway when the time came.”

“What time came?”

“The wedding. He knew Whiteway was angling for Josephine. Marco figured I’d be so mad, I’d kill Whiteway, and Josephine would inherit the money and marry him. And if later I killed her, too, he’d get it all.”

Frost’s one good eye sought Bell’s two. “Marco started this. He’s the one who turned her head. So I reckoned the juggler seeing all his balls come crashing down was my sweetest revenge.”

“Another reason to kill her?” asked Bell.

“Marco knew the Stevens biplane would never make it. He needed Josephine to prove that his flying machines can be fighting machines.”

Bell shook his head. “All she wants is to fly.”

“I gave her the chance, she turned it against me. She deserves to be killed,” Frost whispered.

“You’re dying with hatred on your lips.”

ISAAC BELL WAS DEEPLY RELIEVED to find Texas Walt, sitting in the rain, holding his head.

“Feels like John Philip Sousa’s playing a steam calliope where my brain used to be.”

Bell walked him to the Rolls-Royce and drove it to the trestle, Walt cussing a blue streak at every bump. The mechanicians had repaired the Eagle’s undercarriage. Bell made Walt comfortable on the train. Then he took to the air and headed for Fresno, the last overnight stop before San Francisco. Josephine’s yellow machine and Joe Mudd’s red tractor biplane were tied down fifty yards apart on a muddy fairground. Joe Mudd leaned on crutches, joking with the mechanicians working on his undercarriage.

“Hard landing?” Bell asked.

Mudd shrugged. “Just a busted leg. Machine’s O.K. Mostly.”

“Where’s Josephine?”

“She and Whiteway are at the fairground hotel. I’d steer clear, if I were you.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Stormy weather.”

Bell beckoned Josephine’s detective-mechanicians, who were ferrying tools and parts for Marco Celere, who was shaking his head over her motor. “Keep a sharp eye on Celere. Do not let him near Joe Mudd’s machine.”

“What if he makes a run for it?” asked Dashwood.

“He won’t. Celere’s not going anywhere as long as there’s any chance Josephine will win the race.”

He went to the fairground hotel. Preston Whiteway had rented the top floor of the two-story structure. Bell quickened his pace up the stairs when he heard the publisher shouting at the top of his lungs. He knocked loudly and entered. Whiteway was standing over Josephine, who was curled in a tight ball in a parlor chair, staring at the carpet.

Whiteway saw Bell, and instead of asking what had happened with Harry Frost he shouted, “You talk sense to her! Maybe she’ll listen to you!”

“What’s the matter?”

“My wife refuses to finish the race.”

“Why?”

“She won’t tell me. Maybe she’ll tell you. Where the hell’s my train?”

“Just pulled in.”

“I’ll be in San Francisco for the end of the race.”

“Where is Marion?”

“Gone ahead with her cameras,” Whiteway answered. He lowered his voice to a hoarse stage whisper that Josephine could have heard in the next county and pleaded, “See if you can talk sense into her – she’s throwing away the chance of a lifetime.”

Bell replied with a silent nod.

As Whiteway backed out of the room, he appeared to see Bell for the first time. “You look like you’ve been wrestling grizzly bears.”

“You should have seen the other guy.”

“Help yourself to the whiskey.”

“I intend to,” said Isaac Bell.

41

“WANT SOME?” Bell asked Josephine.

“No.”

Bell filled a short glass, tossed it back neat, filled it again, and sipped. “Josephine, what did you say when Marco asked you to come with him to North Africa?”

She looked up from the carpet, eyes wide. “How did you know that?”

“He made Harry Frost the same offer.”

“Harry? Why?”

“Marco wanted Frost to kill your new husband.”

Josephine’s eyes went dead. “Marco’s worse than Harry,” she whispered.

“I’d say they were neck and neck. What was your answer, Josephine?”

“I told him no.”

Bell watched her closely as he said, “I’ll bet Marco thinks you’ll change your mind when you’re a rich widow.”

“Never. . Is Preston in danger?”

“Harry Frost is dead.”

“Thank God. . Do you think Marco has the guts to kill Preston without Harry’s help?”

Instead of answering that question, Isaac Bell said, “I know why you’re quitting the race.”

“No you don’t.”

“You’re quitting because Marco Celere, disguised as Dmitri Platov, sabotaged the best of the other machines.”

She looked away. “I wondered,” she whispered. “I didn’t just wonder, I suspected. But I didn’t stop him. Losing the race will be my punishment. I have been terrible.”

“Because you didn’t stop him or because you went along with Marco’s plan to frame Harry for murder?”

“Did Harry tell you that, too?”

Bell smiled. “No, I stumbled on that on my own.”

“Looking back, I know it was an evil plan. I knew it then but Harry deserved to be locked up again.”

“Why did you let Marco talk you into marrying Whiteway?”

“I was too tired to argue. I just wanted to win the race-”

“Perhaps you thought that if one marriage could be annulled, so could another?”

“Sure, if we had no honeymoon. And I swear, Isaac, I had no idea Marco planned to kill Preston. Poor Preston, he’s just so. . Poor Preston, he is such a fool, Isaac, he really loves me.”

Bell gave her a gently teasing smile. “Maybe Preston thinks that when you fall in with the wrong men and don’t see what they’re doing, that you’re not so terrible – just single-mindedly myopic in your determination to fly? Maybe that’s why he can’t believe you won’t finish the race.”

“I do not deserve to win. . Are you going to arrest Marco?”

“I can’t, yet. I don’t have enough proof to make a case in court. Besides, I want him free to work on your machine in case you change your mind.”

“I won’t. The winner should win fair and square.”

“You and Joe Mudd are neck and neck. It would be good for the winner, and good for aviation, if you raced right down to the wire. Whatever you’ve done wrong, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve driven a flying machine across the continent. Why don’t you sleep on it? Meantime, I’ll let Marco work on the machine overnight.”