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“What’s that?” asked a detective.
“San Francisco Inquirer flag, which Josephine is supposed to wave when she lands at the Presidio. What is wrong with motor?”
“What do you mean?”
“I do not like the sound.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
Celere looked the detective-mechanician in the eye. Then he flashed his most winning smile. “Let us make a deal, you and me, sir. I will not arrest criminals. You will not tell me that a flying-machine motor sounds like it will not suddenly stop in the sky.”
“Sorry, Celere. You’re right. What do you hear?”
“Bring me soapbox.” He climbed on the box and into the nacelle and played with the throttle, revving and slowing the Antoinette. He cocked his ear, shaking his head in puzzlement. “Pull chocks. Let’s taxi her around a little.”
“Careful you don’t run into anything. Can’t see fifty feet.”
The mechanicians pulled the wooden blocks that were holding the wheels in place.
Celere revved the motor. “You hear? You hear?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Listen. . Here, I make go faster.”
He opened the throttle all the way. The Antoinette’s crisp burble increased to a roar. He turned the rudder, shaped the wings, raced fifty yards along the grass, and soared into the fog.
BELL ORDERED his Eagle made ready to fly, but there was no following Celere in the fog because no one knew which way he had gone. He had to wait until some railroad dispatcher wired a report that he had been spotted. Nearly an hour later, Isaac Bell received a telephone call from the railroad detectives Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley.
“Are you sure you got Harry Frost?”
“I laid him personally on a slab of ice in the Fresno police station.”
“Yeah, well, we just had our second dynamite robbery in two days. Fellow walked into our Merced shop with a coach gun, terrorized the poor old clerk into loading two hundred pounds of dynamite, detonators, and ice tongs on a track inspector’s handcar, and pumped off. We found the handcar three miles down the line next to an empty hayfield. Not a trace of the fellow or the dynamite or the ice tongs.”
“Ice tongs?” Bell echoed, mystified. “What else did he take?”
“Isn’t two hundred pounds of dynamite enough?”
“What else?”
“Hold on!. . Hey, Tom, Mr. Bell wants to know did he take anything else. . Oh yeah. Tom says he took a flashlight and some electric cable.”
“What kind of detonators? Fulminate of mercury?”
“Electric.”
“Did you find any truck or wagon tracks?”
“That’s the funny thing. The only wheel tracks were out in the middle of the field. Nothing by the road except footprints. Strange, don’t you think?”
“Not if he came and left on a flying machine!”
“Oh. Never thought of that. . You still there, Mr. Bell?”
Isaac Bell was running to his American Eagle. “Spin her over!”
The Gnome’s urgent Blat! Blat! Blat! caused Joe Mudd to turn aside and let Bell take off ahead of the Liberator. Bell picked up the Southern Pacific tracks and headed north toward San Francisco. He had less than two hundred miles in which to catch up with Marco Celere.
