Chapter 20 #2
It was not quite dark when the engines throttled back and the aeroplane began to descend.
The lights of a town appeared below. Wherever it was that they were going, they had apparently arrived.
They circled above the town, while Dipper consulted his map with the aid of an electric torch.
He pointed at the ground, and he and Alec exchanged shouts. Down they went again.
The landing was decidedly bumpy, not to say bouncy. Daisy was just grateful to be down in one piece, especially when she realized Alec had landed by the light of a row of paraffin lanterns hung on a fence.
The field was very like their last stop, but with no friendly farmers at hand. Whoever lit the lamps had already left.
“Sioux City, we think,” said Dipper ruefully, helping
Daisy to the ground. “We were aiming for Omaha. Should have turned south when we struck the Missouri River, dash it, as Arrow said. Still, no bones broken, what?”
“Sioux City!” Daisy exclaimed. “As in ‘Little Indian, Sioux or Crow’? We’re in the Wild West, then. It can’t be much farther to Oregon.”
“Awf’ly sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Fletcher, but we’re not even halfway across the country, as near as I can reckon it. The maps I’ve got only go as far as a hundred and five degrees west.”
“This is crazy,” said Alec, stretching wearily. “I don’t suppose you’ve remembered yet, Daisy, where in Oregon Pitt comes from?”
“No, I’m afraid not, darling. Actually, I fell asleep while trying to think of the name of the town. But I will remember, I promise.”
He groaned. “I suppose it’s no good walking into the town.
The telegraph office will be closed, and anyway Washington will be shut down for the weekend.
If only I knew what was going on, whether there’s a general alert out, whether the federal authorities have found out where Pitt’s from and where he’s going. ”
“I can’t see Lambert getting close enough to tell them. So it would take cooperation from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” Daisy pointed out. “Most unlikely.”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?” queried Dipper, intrigued.
“It’s a long story,” said Daisy.
“We’ve got time. We can’t take off again until the early hours of the morning unless we want to land at an unknown field in the dark.”
“Always assuming there’s fuel in that shed,” Alec said gloomily.
“If there isn’t, darling, we’re stymied, which ought to please you. Let’s go and see.”
There was fuel. In the last of the twilight, Alec and Dipper refueled the aeroplane.
Daisy scavenged the last of the food supplies from inside and, by the light of the torch, arranged a meagre picnic within the petrol-smelling shelter of the shed.
The men brought in a couple of the paraffin lanterns, which made things more cheerful and perhaps slightly warmer, though adding to the overall effluvium.
They sat down cross-legged—much easier in aviator’s gear than a skirt, Daisy noted—to curling sandwiches and lukewarm coffee.
“First,” said Daisy, “before I explain everything, would you mind telling me, Sir Roland, why you’re called Dipper? And also why you call Alec ‘Arrow,’ unless it’s just because he’s Fletcher?”
“That’s part of it, of course. But it’s largely because he was the best navigator of all the observer pilots in the RFC.”
“Spare my blushes!” said Alec.
“By George, it’s true, though,” Sir Roland insisted.
“Always flew straight as an arrow to his target. Some of the chaps used to ramble over half of France and come back never having set eyes on whatever they’d been sent to take a dekko at.
Arrow always got the goods. Comes of being a copper, I dare say. Always get your man, do you, old man?”
“Not quite always.”
“Jolly nearly,” said Daisy. “What about ‘Dipper’?”
Sir Roland laughed heartily. “That’s another story!
Thing is, I was shot down two or three times, and ran out of fuel now and then, and then there were mechanical problems—nothing out of the ordinary, by George, nothing that didn’t happen to most of the chaps, sooner or later.
But somehow I always came down in the water, the Channel, a river, a reservoir … ”
“A duck pond,” Alec put in.
“Dash it, that one I prefer to forget, old man! Ever taken a dip in a duck pond, Mrs. Fletcher? I can’t advise it.”
“At least you didn’t drown,” said Daisy, appalled by his list of mishaps.
“True enough. I was lucky.”
“We both were,” said Alec.
“True,” Dipper said soberly. “We came through. Most of the chaps didn’t. I say, is that the last of the sandwiches?”
“I’m afraid so. There’s just an apple left. Darling, let me have your penknife and I’ll slice it. What brought you to America, Sir Roland?”
“Oh, a couple of chaps and I decided to pop over just for fun. Gives a chap something to do, don’t you know?”
“You flew across the Atlantic?”
“Nothing to it these days,” said Dipper mournfully.
“People doing it all the time since Alcock and Brown showed the way in ’19.
We fitted an extra petrol tank in the rear, where you’ve been sitting.
Took it out when we got here, to lighten the load—that’s why our range is only six hundred miles or so—but it’s easily reinstalled when we need it.
Let’s have your tale now. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, eh, what? ”
As the lamps burned lower, Daisy told Sir Roland the story, from the quarrel she had overheard in the next room
the day before the murder to recognizing Wilbur Pitt in the lobby.
“That was just this morning!” she said in astonishment. “It feels like a month ago.”
“So the chap we’re chasing bumped off his cousin as well as pirating a plane?” said Sir Roland. “Ripping!”
“Ye-es.”
Alec pounced on Daisy’s hesitation. “You’re not sure, are you?” he demanded.
“I’m sure I saw him in the Flatiron Building,” Daisy temporized, persuading herself as much as Alec.
She really was pretty certain. She remembered telling Rosenblatt and Gilligan the man had seemed familiar, which could only be because of his resemblance to Carmody.
“It’s just that I can’t help wondering whether he ran because he was afraid he might be shot, too. By someone else, of course.”
“Poppycock,” Sir Roland snorted. “If your chappie was so easily scared, he wouldn’t have been running around waving a gun at the aerodrome.”
“I think he’s right, love,” Alec agreed, to Daisy’s enormous relief. “I rather doubt that shrinking violets are bred in those farms and mines and logging camps, however civilized the Wild West may have become in these degenerate days.”
“In any case,” said Sir Roland, “we can’t let air piracy flourish unpunished. We’ve got to go on, by George, on the off chance that we might catch him when everyone else fails. Time for beddy-byes, now. We’ll take off about two ack emma. Don’t want to waste any time.”
With that, he stretched out along a wall and apparently fell asleep straight away. Daisy, with Alec to warm her and
pillow her head on his shoulder, managed to doze fitfully. She was not so comfortable, however, as to mind much being woken in the middle of the night.
They took off under a waning moon and a million brilliant stars. Daisy slept on and off as they droned westward. Again the changing note of the engine roused her.
In the light of dawn, the aeroplane was circling above a large city. And as it turned, Daisy saw that the way to the west was barred by a wall of mountains, their towering, snowy peaks tinted pink by the approaching sunrise.