The Third Girl Detective

by Margaret Sutton

  “Why indeed? And thanks for the good word.”

  “Do you travel much?” It was a new voice that asked this question. The rather mysterious Danby Force had come up unobserved.

  “Oh yes! We are gypsies. All gypsies travel much,” was the girl’s reply.

  “Where will you go next?”

  “Over the mountains to Cheyenne.”

  “Ah, then you will be going part way back the way we came,” Danby Force said. There was an eager note in his voice. “I wonder if it would be possible for you to take a passenger and to pause for a brief time at a safe landing field?”

  Rosemary started. So Danby Force meant to return. He was going back to the lodge. Had he, after all, taken the dark-faced lady’s bag? Had he hidden it there? Would he return and carry it away? If so, why? Why? Such were the questions that crowded her mind. And she did not like them. She did like Danby Force. She wanted to believe that he was incapable of doing a thing dishonest or dishonorable. She had not forgotten his delightful words about God’s invisible power in our lives.

  But the little French girl was speaking. “If it will help someone,” she was saying. “We will take you over the mountains and stop at this safe place you speak of.”

  “It will help—help a great deal, I assure you!” Danby Force exclaimed. “It may help three thousand people.”

  “There it is again,” Rosemary thought. “Always speaking of thousands.”

  “We might as well get over to the airport,” Mark, the pilot, suggested to Rosemary. “The dark lady has had ample time to lodge her complaint.”

  They went, but much to their surprise found that no complaint had been filed. What was more, the dark lady had vanished. No one about the place could tell them how she had gone, nor where.

  “It’s the strangest business I ever had anything to do with!” Mark grumbled. “Loses her bag, valuable papers and all, and still no complaint. But believe me!” he exclaimed, “we’ve not heard the last of this!” Nor had they.

  CHAPTER III

  THE “FLYING CORNTASSEL”

  The evening after her arrival in Salt Lake City, Rosemary Sample, the young airplane stewardess, overheard a conversation that interested her greatly and at the same time strengthened her faith in the rather mysterious young man, Danby Force.

  She might have thought of herself as an eavesdropper had not the incident occurred in that most public of all public places, the lobby of a large hotel, the Hotel Temple Square. Not that she was staying at so expensive a place. Far from that, she occupied a room in a clean, modest-priced rooming house. But Rosemary had a weakness for large downy chairs, soft lights, expensive draperies and all that and, since at this time of year this hotel was not crowded, she could see no reason why she might not indulge these tastes for an hour or two at least.

  She was buried deep in a heavily upholstered chair, thinking dreamily of her home in Kansas, of her mother, father, and the young people of the old crowd back home. She was smiling at the name they had given her, “The Flying Corntassel of Kansas,” when, chancing to look up, she beheld a vision of beauty all wrapped in deep purple and white. To her astonishment she realized that this was none other than the flying gypsy’s adopted daughter who called herself Petite Jeanne. She wore a long cape of purple cloth trimmed with white fox fur.

  At the same moment someone else caught the vision, Danby Force. And Danby Force had something to say about it.

  “What a gorgeous cape, and what marvelous color!” he exclaimed. There was in his tone not a trace of flattery. He spoke with the sincerity of one who really knows beauty of texture when he sees it.

  “Yes,” the little French girl agreed, “it is very beautiful. It was sent to me only last month by my gypsy friends in France. Since I have had a little money I have helped them at times. Their life is hard. These days are very hard.

  “The cloth,” she went on after a time, “was woven by hand from pure sheep’s wool taken from the high French Alps.”

  “And the color?” Danby Force asked eagerly.

  “Ah-h—” the little French girl smiled. “That is a deep secret that only the gypsies know. There are those who say the kettle of color only boils at midnight and that then the color is mixed with blood. That is nonsense. These are good gypsies, Christian gypsies, just as the great preacher, Gypsy Smith was. But they have their secrets and they keep them well.

  “Perhaps,” she added after a moment’s thought, “this is the royal purple one reads of in the Bible. Who can tell?”

  “That,” said Danby Force, “is a valuable secret.” He motioned the little French girl to a seat and took one close beside her.

  “I know a man,” he said after a moment of silence, “who made some valuable discoveries regarding colors. He could dye cloth in such a manner that it would not fade, yet the process was not costly.

  “This man had spent his boyhood in a town where textile mills had flourished. After his remarkable secret discoveries he returned to that town to find the people idle, the mills falling into decay. The weaving industry had moved south where there was cotton and cheap labor—pitifully cheap!”

  Danby Force paused to stare at the pattern of the thick carpet on the floor. He appeared to be making a mental comparison between that carpet and the cheap rag rugs on the floors in that forgotten town.

  Rosemary stole a look at the little French girl’s face. It was all compassion.

  “And this little forgotten town?” suggested Petite Jeanne at last.

  “It is forgotten no longer.” Danby Force smiled a rare smile. “The man who possessed those rare secrets of color gave them to his home town. Since they were able to produce cloth that was cheap, and better than any other of its kind, the mills began to flourish again and the people to work and smile.

  “But now,” he added as a shadow passed over his interesting face, “their prosperity is threatened once more.”

  Then, as if he had been about to divulge a forbidden secret, he sprang to his feet. “I must be going. We leave at eight. That right?”

  “It is quite right,” agreed Petite Jeanne.

  Rosemary Sample went to her rest that night with a strange sense of futile longing gnawing at her heart. What was its cause? She could not tell. Had she become truly interested in that strange young man, Danby Force, who talked so beautifully of God’s unseen power, who spoke of doing good to thousands, and yet who might have—. She would not say it even to herself, yet she could not avoid thinking. Could she become seriously interested in such a young man? She could not be sure.

  “That charming little French girl is carrying him away in the morning,” she assured herself. “I may never see him again.

  “He is going back to the hunting lodge. I wonder—”

  She tried to picture in her mind the bit of life’s drama that would be enacted by Danby Force and the little French girl after they had landed and gone down the narrow trail to the lodge. In the midst of this rather vain imagining she fell asleep.

  She awoke next morning prepared for one more journey through the air, one more group of passengers. “Wonder if there will be any interesting ones?” she whispered. “Wonder if that dark-faced woman will return with me?” She shuddered. “She’s like a raven, Poe’s raven. Wonder if she’s filed a complaint about her missing bag. And if she has, what will come of it?”

  After oatmeal, coffee and rolls eaten at a counter with the capable and ever friendly Mark Morris at her side, she felt well fortified for the day’s adventures, come what might.

  We advertise our occupation in life by the posture we assume. The barber has his way of standing that marks him as a barber. The clerk of a department store puts on a mask in the morning and takes it off at night. The posture of an airplane stewardess is one suggesting the jaunty joy of life pictured by a blue bird on the tiptop of a tree, seventy feet in air.

  “
Safe?” her posture says plainer than words. “Of course it’s safe to fly. Look at me, I’ve flown four hundred thousand miles.”

  Rosemary Sample was an airplane stewardess to the very tips of her fingers. Her task was a dual one, to inspire confidence and to entertain. She did both extremely well. Yet she too must be entertained. She must receive a thrill now and again. Riding in a plane brought no thrill to her. Only her passengers could bring her the change she craved.

  “There’s always one,” she had a way of saying to her friends, “one passenger who is worth five hours of study.”

  She was not long in finding the “one” on this journey back to Chicago. Strangely enough, he took the seat vacated by the dark-complexioned lady. Yet, how different he was! He was young, not much over twenty, Rosemary thought.

  “Hello, little girl!” were his first words. “What’s your name?”

  “Rosemary Sample.” She smiled because she was saying to herself, “He’ll do the talking. That’s fine. I’m too tired to talk.”

  “So you’re a sample.” He laughed. “I’d like a dollar bottle of the same.”

  “A sample’s all there is and all there can be,” she replied quickly.

  “What! You mean to say you couldn’t grow?”

  “Exactly. Five feet four inches tall, weight a hundred and twenty pounds. Those are the regulations for a stewardess. You can be smaller, but no larger. You see,” she laughed, “they couldn’t make the airplane cabins to fit the stewardesses, tall, short, thin or thick, so the stewardess must be picked to fit the cabin.”

  “Oh!” The young man’s grin was frank, honest and friendly. “Well, this is my first trip in these big birds. I’ve got a little ship all my own, only just now she’s busted up quite a bit.”

  “Cracked up? Too bad!” Rosemary was truly sorry. She was going to like this passenger. Besides, to one who sails the air a crack-up is just as true an occasion for sorrow as a shipwreck is to a mariner on the high seas. “What happened?” she asked quietly. “Bad storm?”

  “No.” He laughed lightly. “Couple of struts got loose. I nearly lost control two thousand feet up. Cracked up in a corn field. Shucked a lot of corn.” He laughed rather loudly.

  Rosemary’s face was sober. She had seen his kind before. They went in for flying because it promised thrills. They neglected their planes. If they crashed and were not killed, they turned it into a joke. The whole thing made her feel sick inside. She loved flying. She thought of it as one of God’s latest and most marvelous gifts to man. She knew too that nothing very short of perfection in care, equipment and piloting could put it in the place in every man’s life where it belonged.

  “So you laugh at a crash that results from carelessness?” Her lips were white. “That’s the sort of thing that makes life hard for all of us who are trying to make flying seem a safe and wonderful thing. Nothing but selfishness could make one laugh at a tragedy or a near tragedy that is his own fault. It—”

  But she stopped herself. After all, she was a stewardess, being paid to be pleasant.

  Springing to her feet, she moved up the aisle to see that the airplane load of traveling salesmen forward had the papers, pencils, magazines and pillows they needed.

  “So you’re a sample,” said the youth as she returned to her seat. “Don’t know as I want a full bottle after all.”

  “In the end you’ll take it.” She was smiling now. “Or someone will be setting up a marble marker where little Willie lies. And that,” she added slowly, “would be too bad.”

  She spoke, not of herself, but her attitude toward aviation. He knew this. She could read it in his eyes.

  “Tha—thanks for these few kind words,” he replied rather lamely.

  Five minutes later this young man, who went by the name of William VanGeldt and whose family evidently were possessed of considerable wealth, was speaking in glowing tones of his mother. He had, the young stewardess discovered, beneath his thin coating of indifference to the serious things of life, a warm heart full of appreciation for the ones who had given of their best that his life might be well worth living.

  “He’ll take the full bottle,” she whispered to herself. “And he’ll get to like it.” She was to learn the truth of these words in days that were to come.

  CHAPTER IV

  WITH THE AID OF PROVIDENCE

  To the little French girl, Petite Jeanne, each day dawned as a bright new adventure. Mysteries might come and go, as indeed they often had, but adventure! Ah yes, adventure was always with her.

  Nor had her new treasure, the airplane with its gauze-like wings, lessened her opportunity for adventure. Indeed it had increased it tenfold. To Rosemary Sample one might say, “Well, you’re off to another airplane journey,” and she undoubtedly would answer with a sigh, “Yes, one more trip.” Not so Petite Jeanne. She was not reckless, this slender child of the air. Her motor was inspected often, each guy and strut tested, her radio tuned to the last degree of perfection. For all that, each day as she took to the air it was with such a leaping of the heart as comes only with fresh adventure.

  And so it was that, as she climbed into the cockpit, with Madame Bihari, Danby Force, and the tiny gypsy girl at her back, she touched the controls of her perfect little plane for all the world as if never before had her fingers known that touch. And as, after skimming along the air above the foothills, she began climbing toward one lone snowy peak among the Rockies, her heart was filled to overflowing with a fresh zest for living.

  “Just to live,” she whispered, “to live, to love, to dream, to hope and sometimes see our hopes fulfilled! To see the dew on the grass in the early morning, to hear the robins chirping in the early evening, to watch children play, to feel the wind playing in your hair, to feel the warm sunshine kiss your cheeks, to watch the red and gold of evening sky. Ah yes, and to watch that snowy peak just before me, watch it grow and grow and grow—that is life—beautiful, wonderful, glorious life!”

  The airplane, which might have seemed to one far away a giant silver insect, went gliding about the white capped mountain to drop at last with scarcely a bump upon that landing field that had at other times been a pasture above the clouds.

  How convenient it would be if at times one’s spirit might, for a space of a half hour or more, leave the body that, closing about it, holds it in one place, and go with the speed of light to distant scenes. The spirit of Rosemary Sample, speeding away toward Chicago, might for a quarter hour or more have been spared from the great trans-continental airplane. No one surely would have begrudged so faithful a worker such a short period of recreation. And surely Rosemary would have been thrilled by the opportunity of following our little company on the mountain crest as they left Jeanne’s plane and followed the trail winding down to the hunting lodge.

  Had the spirit of Rosemary truly been with them, she must surely have been asking herself, “Why is Danby Force here? What does he expect to find at the lodge? Did he take the dark lady’s traveling bag? Is it hidden there? Will he find it? And if he does, what will he take from it? ‘Valuable papers’ were the dark lady’s words. Were there such papers? There is some relation between this fine-appearing young man and that lady. What can it be?” So the spirit of Rosemary Sample might have spoken to itself had it followed down the mountainside. But the spirit of Rosemary Sample was not there. Rosemary Sample, body, soul and spirit, was in the trans-continental plane speeding on toward Chicago. And beside her, now talking loudly and boastfully of his dangerous exploits as an amateur aviator, and now speaking in kindly and gentle tones of his mother, was young Willie VanGeldt.

  “I should not care for him at all,” Rosemary told herself. Yet there was something about him, his light and good-natured views of life, his smile perhaps, something about him that claimed her interest.

  “As if the stars had willed that for a time our lives should run together, like trains on parallel trac
ks,” she whispered to herself. Little did she guess the part that this youth with his wealth and his reckless ways would play in her life, nor that which she would play in his.

  In the meantime Jeanne, Danby Force and their gypsy companions were wending their way down the trail that led to the hunting lodge.

  “I shan’t detain you long,” Danby Force was saying to Jeanne. “It’s just a little thing I want to look into up here.”

  Jeanne, whose curiosity had not as yet been aroused, scarcely heard him. She was awed and charmed by the grandeur and beauty of the mountains. To look up two thousand feet to the snow-clad rocks that were the mountain peaks, then to look down quite as far to the tree-grown canyons far below—ah that was grand!

  When at last they came in sight of the rustic lodge, flanked as it was by massive rocks and half covered by overhanging boughs of evergreens, she stopped in her tracks to stand there lost in admiration.

  “Ah!” she murmured, “What a grand solitude is here! Who would not wish to return many, many times!”

  She was soon enough to learn that it was not solitude the interesting young man, Danby Force, sought. For, contrary to Rosemary Sample’s suspicion, he had not hidden the dark lady’s traveling bag. He had returned to seek it. How did he hope to succeed when, on that other occasion, all others had failed? Well may one ask. Yet Danby Force did not lack for hope. He believed in a kind Providence that sometimes guides an honest soul in its search for hidden things. With the aid of this Providence he might succeed where others had failed.

  CHAPTER V

  DANBY’S SECRET

  Before leaving Salt Lake City, in accord with the customs of all gypsies, Madame Bihari and Jeanne had laid in a supply of provisions. Having come upon them while in the act, Danby Force had added a few luxuries to the stock. They were therefore prepared for a stay of some length if need be.

  In spite of this, Danby Force said as he entered the lodge, “We won’t be here long I hope. I came to look for that bag.” He favored Jeanne with a smile.