The Third Girl Detective

by Margaret Sutton

  He pounded hard on an electric button. Mark Sullivan, the day watchman, appeared at the door.

  “Mark,” Danby said in a steady tone, “go find Hugo. Bring him here. If he refuses to come, use force—but bring him!”

  But Hugo was not to be found. He was gone. He had flown in the truest sense of the word. Strangest of all, it was the little French girl, Petite Jeanne, who aided in his escape. This may not seem so strange when we recall that Jeanne had never seen Hugo and that Hugo surely had a way with the ladies.

  It was late afternoon of that same day. Petite Jeanne sat in the door of her dragon fly airplane. The door faced the sun. She was basking in its warmth. She loved the sun, did this little French girl. She had once heard an aged gypsy say the sun was the smiling face of God. A rather fanciful remark this, yet it had stayed in her mind. “At least,” she told herself, “God made the sun and everything He created is good, so surely He means us to enjoy the sunshine.”

  All day long, without presuming to call upon the busy Danby Force, or even upon Florence, Jeanne had wandered through the town and had come to love it.

  “It is wonderful!” she had said to Madame Bihari. “And to think that any possible harm might come to it! This indeed is too terrible!”

  She was thinking of all this when her eye caught sight of a person approaching rapidly. It was Hugo.

  “You are Petite Jeanne,” he said. He appeared to be in great haste.

  “Yes, I—”

  “I am a friend of Florence,” he said, casting his spell with a beaming smile.

  “A friend of Florence is my friend.”

  “Ah!” One might have detected in the man’s deep intake of breath a feeling of great relief.

  “Then you will help me!” he exclaimed.

  “But yes, if I may.” Jeanne was on her feet.

  “If you would but take me a short distance in your plane—it will not require an hour—you will be back before dark.” Hugo talked rapidly as one in great haste.

  “What could be easier? Will you come aboard?” Jeanne climbed to her place at the wheel.

  Ah, poor Jeanne! Had you but known!

  A little thrill ran up the little flier’s spine as her plane took to the air. She felt restless, ill at ease.

  “Ah well,” she whispered, “just one more incident in a flying gypsy’s life—nothing more.”

  It was more, much more than that, as she was to learn.

  Time passed. In Chicago it had been dark for two hours. Rosemary Sample was seated at her desk in her own private room. A radio head-set had been clamped down over her ears for two hours. She was reading a book. At the same time she was listening. She had not forgotten her promise to be on the air listening every evening she was at her home port, listening for that code number she had given so long ago, but never forgotten.

  Of a sudden the book dropped from her nerveless fingers. A message of startling clearness had reached her ears.

  “48—48! Petite Jeanne! One hundred miles north of Happy Vale, an abandoned farm. You will see my plane. Help! Come quick, or you may be too late!”

  “Too late?” Rosemary repeated, springing to her feet.

  A moment later she had Jerry, the mechanic, on the wire:

  “That motor done?” she demanded. “This is Rosemary Sample.”

  “Just finished. But say!—”

  Rosemary hung up.

  Another moment and she was talking to Willie VanGeldt.

  “Willie,” she said, “this is Rosemary Sample. Be down at the flying field in a quarter hour. I’m going to take a ride in your plane.”

  “A ride? That’s great! Say—”

  Once more Rosemary hung up.

  When Willie appeared, prompt to the moment, he found his plane oiled, fueled and ready for flight.

  “What’s happened?” he demanded. “You said you’d never fly in my plane. You—”

  “Hop in,” Rosemary commanded. “I’ve had duplicated head-sets put in. We can talk on the way. We’ll be flying the best part of the night.”

  Willie’s mouth dropped, but, be it said to his everlasting credit, he never faltered. Three minutes later they were in the air flying an air-lane in the dark.

  Rosemary shuddered as she thought what the outcome of this journey might be. Not that night flying over a regular air route, such as they were to follow for hundreds of miles, is usually hazardous. It is not. The way is “fenced” in by code signals broadcast by radio stations along the way. If the pilot is on the beaten path he hears a series of dot signals. If he swings to the right, this becomes dot-dash, and if to the left it becomes dash-dot, so he never loses the way.

  “Unless—” the girl whispered to herself. She had seen to it that Willie’s motor was O.K. She smiled grimly as she thought of the month’s pay it would cost her.

  “But if I had chartered one of our own planes, it would have taken half a year to pay up.” That, with her mother back in Kansas looking to her for part of her support, was not to be considered. “I just had to come!” she told herself. “I promised. And that little French girl would never call unless there was some great need.”

  “Listen to that motor!” Willie chuckled in her ear. “Never heard it rattle along so sweetly.”

  “No,” Rosemary agreed, smiling down deep in her soul, “I guess you never did!”

  “For all that,” she thought, “he’s a real sport, shooting away like this into the night without asking a single question.”

  “Willie!” she exclaimed aloud, “We’re getting dot-dashes! You’re off the course.

  “There!” she sighed ten seconds later. “That’s O.K.”

  So they zoomed on into the night.

  What had caused Jeanne to call for help?

  She had flown the hundred miles when, to her surprise, she was ordered to make a landing on a pasture of what appeared to be a small farm.

  This was a level country. She experienced no trouble in landing and in taxiing her plane up to a spot near the house.

  “Wait!” Hugo commanded. “There may be some message to take back.”

  There was that about Hugo’s look, the tone of his voice that gave Jeanne a sudden impulse.

  “As soon as he’s inside I’ll take a run down that pasture, then go into the air,” she told herself.

  As if he had read Jeanne’s thoughts, Hugo turned and looked back. Then it came to Jeanne as a sort of revelation, “He must be one of the spies! And I—I have been aiding him to escape!”

  Hugo had disappeared through a door. Like a flash Jeanne leaped for the shadows beneath a window.

  There, chilling and thrilling, she listened to strange voices. There were, she told herself, a man and a woman. They spoke in a foreign tongue. But Jeanne, who had lived long in Europe, knew a little of many tongues. She was able to understand enough to know that they were discussing the advisability of flight over the border.

  “But have you all the papers?” a woman’s voice demanded.

  “Yes, all.” It was Hugo who answered. “Pictures, diagrams, plans, everything. They are there in the black bag.”

  “If only I had that bag!” thought Jeanne.

  But now they had reached a decision. They would come out. She must not seem to have been listening.

  To her surprise, as she sprang toward her plane, she saw that it had grown quite dark. The discussion had lasted longer than she had thought.

  “Here! Where are you?” Hugo called. “We have decided to ask you to fly us to Canada. We will pay you very well.”

  “I—I’ll have to see if I have enough gas,” Jeanne said in as even a tone as she could command.

  This was true. But that was not all. She meant, at the risk of her life if need be, to get off a message. Then it was that, after softly closing her cabin door she had sent the message that reached
Rosemary Sample’s ears and sent her flying away into the night.

  “But what am I to do next?” Jeanne whispered to herself, all but in despair. What indeed?

  CHAPTER XXV

  LOST IN THE AIR OF NIGHT

  Petite Jeanne surely was in a tight place. Hugo and the dark lady—for it was she who had been with Hugo in the house—with what they had described as all the material needed to exploit the secret process of the Happy Vale textile mill, were awaiting her. To carry them across the border would be a simple matter. She was close to a “radio-fenced” air-lane. To follow this, even in the night, was a simple matter.

  But the little French girl did not propose to follow it. To do this would almost certainly lose for Danby Force his only chance to save his happy little city from ruin.

  No, Petite Jeanne could not do that. But what could she do? Should she start her motor and make a try at escape? To do this she realized would be perilous. The spies might be armed. She could not get away on the instant. They might wreck her plane, or even worse.

  “And they’d still have their black bag,” she told herself.

  She decided on flight, on foot, alone. Where to? She did not know.

  Opening the door of her cabin, without a sound she slipped away into the night.

  She had barely rounded the corner of a low shed when she heard a door swing open, and Hugo called:

  “Here! Where are you? Is there gas enough?”

  “Yes,” Jeanne whispered beneath her breath. “But not for such an evil purpose!

  “They’ll be after me with a flashlight,” she told herself, thrown into sudden panic.

  The large red barn of the farm loomed before her. Into its inviting darkness she crept.

  At once a pleasing fragrance reached her nostrils—Nature’s own perfume, the smell of new cut clover hay. Jeanne knew that glorious perfume. More than once as a gypsy she had slept within the shadow of a haystack.

  Next instant, with breath coming short and quick, she was climbing a narrow ladder leading to the loft. At its top she tumbled into the welcoming billows of sweet smelling hay.

  Creeping far back, she burrowed like a rat and was soon quite lost from sight.

  “Never find me here,” she whispered.

  She listened. The silence was complete. Then she caught a low, rustling sound.

  “Mice in this hay!” She shuddered. She hated mice; yet nothing could induce her to give up this place of hiding.

  From far below she heard Hugo call again:

  “Here! Where are you?”

  A moment later, through the broad cracks of the barn wall she caught a gleam of light, then heard their sharp exclamations upon discovering that she was gone.

  “What will they do?” she asked herself. “Will they finally become angry and demolish my plane? My so beautiful dragon fly!” She was ready to weep.

  Would they attempt to fly the plane themselves and wreck it? She could but wait and see.

  “Never find me here,” she repeated to herself as she sank deep into the fresh cut clover.

  In the meantime Rosemary Sample and Willie VanGeldt were speeding to the rescue.

  “Strange business this for a steady going stewardess of the air,” Rosemary was saying to herself. “I suppose there are a million girls who believe that being an airplane stewardess is exciting. Nothing, I suppose, is less exciting. But this—this is different, flying through the night with an amateur pilot in a plane that—”

  “Willie!” she exclaimed, “We’re on the dot-dash again. Swing over. We’ve got to keep on the dotted line.”

  Time passed. An hour sped into eternity, and yet another hour. It was approaching midnight. Rosemary switched on the dot-dot-dot of the directive radio to tune in on her home station and ask for a weather report.

  The report filled her with fresh concern. “Willie,” she said in a quiet voice that, after all, was tense with emotion, “we’re headed straight for a thunderstorm. Be in the midst of it in less than an hour if we keep on this air-lane.”

  “And if we don’t keep on it,” Willie groaned, “we’re lost, lost in the air at night. I’m for zooming straight ahead. Storm may swing some other way.”

  It did not swing some other way. Three quarters of an hour later they were in the midst of it. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud. The sky was black. Only the steady dot-dot-dot of the directive radio gave them hope.

  And then, right in the midst of it, when the wind was tearing at their wings, when their struts were singing and the flash-flash of lightning was all but continuous, disaster descended upon them. Their radio went dead.

  “I might have known!” Rosemary groaned within herself. “Perfection, only perfection of equipment and eternal vigilance such as a great transport company exercises can save one in the air.

  “But I’ll not say a word!” She set her teeth hard. “Have to carry on.” Snapping on a small light attached to a cord, she set about the task of inspecting the radio connections, a trying task in such a moment of sky turmoil.

  In the meantime the ones who had been left marooned in that abandoned farmhouse by Jeanne’s sudden flight were discussing their plight.

  For a full half hour they had hunted the missing little French girl. Giving this up at last, they returned to the house.

  “What is to be done?” the woman asked.

  “There is little to be lost by waiting,” suggested Hugo. He hated darkness and night. “She can’t have gone far. It is pitch dark. A storm is coming up out of the west. She has no light. If she had, we should have seen it. She will be frightened and return.”

  “But why did she leave?” the woman asked. “Did you give her cause for fear?”

  Hugo shrugged. “Who knows what a gypsy will do? I should not have trusted her.

  “She’ll hardly do us harm before dawn,” he added. “I have flown a plane a few thousand miles. In daytime I would attempt a solo flight, but at night, and a storm in sight? No, it would not do.”

  After that, having brewed themselves some strong coffee and gulped it down, they settled themselves as comfortably as might be to await the coming dawn.

  And Jeanne? Strange as it may seem, hidden away there in the hay, she had fallen fast asleep. Had you been there to waken her and ask her how she could sleep in such a place, doubtless her answer would have been:

  “What would you have? I could not be harmed more quickly asleep than when awake. Besides, at heart I am a gypsy. Gypsies sleep where and when they may.”

  In the meantime Rosemary Sample and her rich young pilot were battling the storm. Having long since lost the beaten airway, they were flying blind.

  The storm was all about them. Now the lightning appeared to leap across their plane wings. Now, caught by a rushing gush of wind and rain, they were all but hurled through space; and now, met by a counter-current, like a ship in a heavy sea they appeared to stand quite still.

  All this time, quite unconscious of the tumult, Rosemary was working over the radio. She tested a wire here, a tube there. She pried, twisted and tapped, but all to no avail.

  And then, with a suddenness that was startling, they glided from out the storm into a gloriously moonlit world. The earth lay silent beneath them. The whole of it, groves of trees, broad farms, sleeping villages, was bathed in golden glory.

  “If only we knew where we were!” Willie sighed.

  “But boy! Oh boy! What do you think of my motor now? I didn’t think it would go through that.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Rosemary replied drily.

  Then of a sudden she fairly leaped to her feet. “It’s working!” she cried. “The radio is working! I’m getting something.

  “Willie,” she said a moment later, “turn sharply to the right and keep up that course.”

  After that for some time only the zoom of the motor was heard.
Then—

  “There, Willie! I have it. Dot-dash, dot-dash! Keep straight on. We’ll be on the air-lane in just no time at all.”

  And they were.

  Dawn found them wide-eyed and resolute, circling the vicinity of that spot where they believed Jeanne’s message had originated.

  “Ought to find it,” Willie grumbled. “Getting light enough. Just saw a farmer going out to milk his cows. He—”

  “Listen!” Rosemary stopped him. “Hear that! There’s another airplane near here. Yes, yes! There it is over there to the right!”

  “It’s strange.” Willie’s brow wrinkled. “They seem to be circling too. Wonder if—”

  “They might be looking for Jeanne’s silver-winged plane too.”

  “Friend or foe?” Willie’s eyes were fixed for a second on that other plane as if he would read the answer there.

  They began making wider circles. The strange plane was lost to view when, with a suddenness that was startling, the girl gripped Willie’s arm to exclaim:

  “There! Right down there it is!”

  Jeanne had wakened from her sleep in that strange, fragrant bed two hours before. For a long time she had lain there wondering how this affair was to end. She had all but dozed off again when she was wakened by the familiar and, to her at this time, startling sound of an airplane motor.

  “My motor!” There was no mistaking that. She knew the sound too well. At once she went into a panic.

  “My airplane!” she all but wailed. “My so beautiful big dragon fly! Those terrible people will try to fly it away, and they will wreck it!”

  At once she was torn between two desires—the wish to preserve her choicest treasure and her desire to serve Danby Force and his wonderful little city.

  If she went to the spies now and offered to fly them across the border, they would permit her to do so, she was sure of that. But would she do it?

  “No, oh no!” she sobbed low. “I must not!” She stopped her ears that she might not hear her motor and be tempted too much.

  That was how it happened that when Willie and Rosemary came zooming down from the sky to land upon that narrow pasture, she did not hear them at all, and had no notion that they had arrived.