PRIZE OF THE AIR

At a height of about two thousand feet Bill Barlow completed the loop and then flew into the wind over the landing “T”.

“Great stuff!” yelled his passenger, and Bill could hear his chuckle, for he had now throttled his motor and was making a quick bank to the left.

“Thought you’d like it,” he called back, “but it may get me in wrong down below.”

After making a complete circle, he landed just where he had intended to, and taxied up toward the hangars. It was a maneuver he had learned thoroughly years before, when he was a cadet flyer—this landing with a dead engine.

Bill’s passenger was smiling as he unbuckled his safety belt and climbed from the cockpit, but there was no smile on the face of the field superintendent who came running up to the plane.

“Hey, what’s the idea, Barlow?” he queried. “You know as well as I do that it’s against the law to loop with a passenger, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“You bet it’s right! Then why did you do it?”

“Boss,” said Bill Barlow, showing his sound teeth in a wide grin, “Mr. Saxton here, my passenger, has some red blood in his veins. He offered me five hundred dollars to loop the loop with him. You know that temptation is the one thing I can’t resist, and—well, Mr. Saxon’s got plenty of jack, and if I didn’t do it he’d have found some one who would, and I just happened to need the five hundred very badly right now.”

“Well, I’ve got nothing against you personally, Barlow,” said the superintendent, which was probably true, for very few people had anything against the likable Barlow. “But either I’m here to see that the rules of this field are kept, or I’m not. You fellows are getting too skittish around here. I’ll have your license as a passenger pilot revoked.”

As a matter of fact, he did have Bill’s license revoked. Friendship in private life is one thing; in aviation, as in the army, it is quite another when it interferes with vested authority.

But Bill Barlow didn’t seem to mind. A man who can laugh in the face of death is not to be disturbed by such a trifle as the revocation of a license. It was Saxton, his passenger, who seemed the more concerned. He approached Bill later that afternoon.

“I think I’ve got a job for you, Barlow,” he said. “I’ve got to start tomorrow for my home in Pampa, New Mexico, and trains are getting too slow for me in my old age. How about flying me there? I’ll buy the gas and pay you for the trip.”

Bill looked at him wistfully, and shook his head.

“You’re hitting me right where I live,” he said dolefully. “An old pal of mine, Jack Harraden, is barnstorming down that way, and I’d like to join him. If I could make connections with Harraden I’d be set for the season. More than once Jack and I have gone through a season together stunting at fairs and carnivals—and I’d like to make the dough, too. But you know I can’t go.”

“And why not? Seems an ideal arrangement to me. And, by the way, when I left Pampa, your friend Harraden was part of a carnival at Las Vegas, according to the papers.”

“Las Vegas, eh? Well, I might join him. But I couldn’t carry you, now that my passenger license is revoked.”

Saxton laughed. “I’ll fix that for you, boy! I’ll buy your plane. Give you two thousand dollars for it. You ride with me technically as a passenger, but you’re hired to do what you’re told to do—and you’ll be at the joy-stick. Get the idea?”

Bill got the idea, and the transaction was duly carried out.

“Remember,” Saxton warned him, as he pocketed the dummy bill-of-sale. “I’ve ‘bought’ that plane. I have you at my mercy now. I may charge you plenty when you want to get it back—and get the free ride into the bargain.”

“Fair enough!” Bill chuckled. “But you haven’t got it all your own way, Mr. Wise Guy. Don’t be surprised if I suddenly decide to quit piloting the ship when we’re five thousand feet above a Kansas farm and take to parachute stunts unless you come to time with me.”

So Bill Barlow and Frank C. Saxton, since they could laugh with each other and threaten to do each other, knew that they were friends, and the next day Bill Barlow had his ship ready for the long jump.

Saxton wished to arrive at Pampa, where he operated a cattleman’s bank, as soon as possible, he explained, as a shipment of gold bullion was due in Pampa that week from a correspondent bank in Trinidad, Colorado. He wanted to be on the ground when the transfer was made.

He rode out to the field in a taxicab accompanied by a slender, gray-eyed girl who looked trim and athletic in a heavy blue jersey and knickers.

“Think she’s dressed warm enough for the hop?” Saxton asked, his shrewd eyes twinkling. “I forgot to mention yesterday that my daughter is going along. This is Mr. Barlow, Ruth. He’s the fellow that looped the loop with your dad yesterday.”

Ruth extended her hand boyishly, and Bill may have held it just a trifle too long, but the act was unconscious.

“The more I see of you bankers, Mr. Saxton,” he said, turning to the gray-haired man, “the less I value your keenness in a business deal despite your reputation. If I’d known Miss Saxton was coming along, I’d have piloted you for nothing.”

And the remark may not have been entirely jocular. Hours later, flying high above the fields of Ohio, Bill Barlow somehow could not develop that devil-may-care feeling that he always had in the air.

He had done his share of stunt-flying and had never known fear of any kind, but right now there was a certain conscious concern within him which he could not analyze. He finally doped out what the matter was.

It was the precious freight he was carrying. Those straight-gazing gray eyes of Ruth Saxton had nearly sunk Bill Barlow.

A single stop was made, at the air mail field at Maywood, Illinois, for refueling; then the flight was continued, and completed without special incident, Bill Barlow making a landing in a field just east of the town of Pampa.

He had never been in the Southwest before, and he was eagerly anticipating the surprise he had in store for Jack Harraden. Two planes in a New Mexico town would be something of a sensation, he assumed.

That day he enjoyed an old-fashioned noonday dinner at the comfortable home of the Saxtons, and telephoned Las Vegas. The city authorities, Saxton had said, could doubtless enlighten him as to the activities of his friend Harraden.

But the news he received proved to be a keen disappointment. Harraden had been flying passengers in Las Vegas, but had hopped off in his De Haviland two days before, saying that he was going to Beaumont, Texas.

“Me for Beaumont, then,” said Bill, “I’m beginning to vegetate already, with nothing to do.”

Ruth Saxton lowered her eyes. She was not the type to be forward. If this good-looking chap chose to hop off for Beaumont, then that was his business, she supposed.

And Frank C. Saxton said nothing. He had liked Barlow on sight, but he himself was in the banking business and this young daredevil would never be satisfied with that. And Bill himself was thinking that he might better have been in some game like banking as the husband of a gray-eyed girl like—

Oh, well, he’d hop off for Beaumont in the morning.

But he did not hop off for Beaumont in the morning. For something happened that night to keep him from Beaumont. As a matter of strict record, to this day he has never seen Beaumont.

II

Barlow borrowed one of Saxton’s cayuses to take a lope into the hills. He would have invited Ruth along, but then he was not sure that Ruth would be interested, and anyhow he realized that he did not cut a very expert figure on a horse.

Hard work, too, this horseback riding. He realized it more and more as the sun gradually sank behind the ridge to the west of the town. He had been walking beside his mount along the trail, but with darkness approaching he decided to try once more to ride, despite his soreness.

Saxton would probably be wondering what had become of him. Dusk had fallen with unexpected swiftness here in the mountains, and he was none too sure of the trail.

It was as he was rounding a curve from where he hoped to be able to see the fork leading into Pampa that he heard a sound that could not possibly be mistaken—by Bill Barlow. He had heard that sound too often to make any mistake about it.

That subdued roar was the pounding of twelve cylinders all right enough. He’d have bet a million dollars on it—if he had had it.

He gazed up into the violescent dusk. The roar was getting louder now, and sure enough, over the ridge from out of the north swooped a great shadow that circled about and made a landing in the hill-rimmed meadow just below him to the right.

“Jack Harraden!” he said to himself, “He must have heard I was in Pampa.”

Bill Barlow forgot all about the trail into town now. He took the first path that led downward, tied his tired beast to a fence-post and started afoot cross-country in the darkness, guided by the roar of the plane’s engine as it taxied along the ground.

He continued on, the soft ground serving as a pad for his feet. He heard the sound of men’s voices after a considerable walk, and he was about to call out when he discovered that the men were wrangling over something. He could not make out the words, but there was no mistaking the intonation.

Some sixth sense caused him to stoop in the shelter of the fence that inclosed a large field with an overhanging hill at one corner it. He could distinguish the outline of the plane there in the gloom, its wings looking ghostlike and mysterious, and from the loud voices he could tell that the men were walking in his direction.

Some of the talk was in Spanish, and he got a word of it here and there. Bill had taken Spanish two years at college—and had become very fluent in football.

He caught the words “Pancho Lopez” and “dinero,” which he knew meant money. Then, to his satisfaction, a new voice boomed out in English:

“Yeh, he’s big chief—down there. But I’m boss up here until this thing is put over, Ramos, and don’t ever forget it!”

There was a sullen response in Spanish, too low in tone for Bill to make it out.

“That’s all right,” came the first man’s voice again. “That third plane stays in the hills. You never can tell what might happen. Them armored cars could pick us off up there in the air with the right breaks.”

Bill Barlow lay prone beside the fence as the men—there seemed to be four of them—passed within a few feet of him. One of them had a holster strapped at his side and wore a cartridge belt.

He seemed to be the leader, and he was raking down the untractable Ramos who had evidently ventured to irritate him with some rash suggestion. His voice trailed off as the group walked toward a dark smudge a hundred yards or so away which Bill thought might be a cabin.

“An armored car!” Could there be any connection? Saxton had told him that afternoon that he wished him to remain in Pampa in order to meet his son, who was coming down with the bullion shipment from Trinidad in an armored car.

Bill Barlow waited until there was no sound from the cabin, if that was what it was, then leaped the fence and crept toward the airplane. No watchman had been left on guard, and Bill believed the mysterious aviators might return at any moment.

On the far side of the plane he risked a flash from his torch, and then snapped it off quickly.

The ship was a De Haviland painted green. In front of the pilot’s seat was mounted a machine gun. Bill thought he recognized the type and that it was synchronized to shoot between the blades of the propeller.

At any rate, it was a weird sight on an airplane in peace time in a New Mexico meadow.

He did not risk another flash, but scurried away in the darkness, and somehow found his way to his tethered horse. When he finally reached the Saxton home it was almost dawn, and he rapped on the window that he knew to be Saxton’s.

In a couple of minutes the banker, pyjama-clad, stuck his head out.

“What the devil’s up?” he asked, sleepily. “Where were you, Bill?”

“I’ll tell you all that later,” Bill replied. “Meanwhile, I’ll ask you one. What time is your son starting from Trinidad in that armored car?”

“Who? Ted? Why, he may have started by this time. First streak of daylight they’ll shove off. Roads’ll be clearer then, and what folks don’t see won’t bother ’em.” Saxton kindled a cigar, and gave vent to his rumbling laugh. “Why? You’re not worrying about that, are you? That type of armored car could stand off an army, boy.”

“I suppose so. But, Saxton, I want you to do something right away. Get Trinidad on the phone. If your son hasn’t started, tell him to wait till tomorrow. Make it emphatic. It may be very important. If he has started, get one of the towns this side of Trinidad, and see that the car is held there. Now do that. Be sure. Will you, Saxton?”

The banker looked at him keenly.

“There’s something up, I can see that,” he said. “But I think you’re getting upset over a trifle. Those armored cars, you know—”

“Yes, I know,” Bill cut in.

Should he mention his discovery to Saxton? He might be on the wrong track entirely. The armed plane might possibly be one of the exhibits from the recent Las Vegas carnival.

At any rate, only he himself could be of any possible service now, if the car had started from Trinidad. No use worrying Saxton and Ruth, he decided.

He waited until he heard Saxton at the telephone asking for long distance to Trinidad, and then grabbing up a rifle and several rounds from a little den-like hunting room which Saxton had furnished off of the living-room, he remounted his horse and galloped along the road to the east of the town, and, just as dawn streaked the sky, reached his plane.

A few minutes later he had turned the horse loose to graze, and had hopped off, the nose of his old Jenny pointed toward Trinidad.

As he sailed along he wondered if he was on a useless quest. He might be.

In the first place, there was a possibility that his suspicions were not well founded. Then Saxton might be able to get Trinidad before the armored car started, and could head it off.

But as he flew along he almost hoped that he was in for action. For that was the way with Bill Barlow. Fellow war aces had said that he “fattened on trouble.”

And, if that was the case, there was enough trouble ahead to make Bill Barlow very fat indeed.

III

Bill flew straight north for awhile and had no difficulty picking up the Trinidad road which wound about the foothills rimming Pampa to the north. After he had skimmed over the hills he swung lower in order to scout the highway thoroughly.

He passed over a couple of little settlements and climbed to a higher altitude, for there was mountainous country ahead. It was after he had climbed high and had sailed over the summit that he made out a low-flying plane ahead.

He used his binoculars—the plane was the green De Haviland of the night before, as he had suspected it would be. But the hawk would wait for its prey in vain if Saxton’s telephone call had been in time. And then, as he zoomed along, he saw that he was in for action.

A turreted car of the type used by banks to transport money and bullion swept around a hairpin turn in the road that hugged a steep bluff, and as soon as the car had swung into the straight road Bill saw a grayish cloud shoot up just ahead of the car. It looked to him as if a bomb had been dropped; and yet it did not seem possible from the position of the green plane.

Bill Barlow put on all speed, and tilted his aërilons to climb. He was planning to get above the green plane and keep it below and in front of him where he would be safe from that machine gun nested in front of the pilot.

In this manner he might be able to take the joy-stick between his knees, get a pot-shot at the pilot, and send the green ship down out of control. It was a long chance, but it was his only one, and Bill Barlow had fought against long odds before.

He hardly believed he was seen as yet, and he nosed up steadily toward a low-hanging cloud. And then, as he climbed, he noticed, backgrounded against the cloud, another plane—a big blue-gray one, that seemed almost to blend into the cloud. This, then, was probably the explanation of that explosion that had taken place in front of the armored car.

The second plane was far above him, and, although his own ship was a good climber, Barlow realized that it would be useless now to try to get above the blue-gray plane. He would have to take one chance and wait until it dived.

The blue-gray plane had sighted him now, and he maneuvered as it started down after him. The man at the machine gun was trying to get Barlow from the rear; but that game was only too familiar to Bill.

His mind went back over ten years to glorious jousts above the lines, and almost instinctively he changed his course by a sharp turn to the right. The blue-gray plane followed him, its pilot still trying feverishly to get Barlow in front of him—which is just what Bill Barlow had no intention of letting him do.

Since he himself had no machine gun, there was no offensive advantage in getting to the rear himself, but there was a strong advantage defensively. If he kept on the tail of the other machine he would be able to spike that machine gun.

Around and around circled the planes in this carousel of death, for that was what it was, Bill Barlow knew, although just at present there were no wars nor rumors of wars. Below them on the slopes cattle grazed peacefully, but here in the air was the seed of death.

He must not let that gray plane take him from the rear. Both of the ships were steadily losing altitude, but Bill knew the possibilities of his own plane, and he might lure the enemy until it got too low to maneuver, and it might crash.

He was pretty low himself now, as he circled about. He started to dash and zig-zag—anything to get out of the path of that machine gun. And yet he had to get out of the circle to climb. He’d try it.

It was a few minutes after this, just as he had reached a safer altitude and once more tried to get on the tail of the gray, that a spray of machine gun bullets pinged against the wires of his ship. But he was in the strategic position that he wished now. With the joy-stick between his knees, he flew slightly above the enemy plane and shouldered his rifle. It spoke, and the pilot of the gray plane let go of the joy-stick and placed his hands to his side. Then the gray plane seemed to leap and swerve and turn, fell into a nose dive and went out of control.

As he tried to bank and make now for the green ship, Bill Barlow realized that he had not escaped unscathed. His own plane careened sharply, and at first he feared that his control wires had been shot away. Probably not, though—the ship still took direction, if rather awkwardly.

He could still make a landing if he kept the ship’s nose up, although he knew that now he had been put out of the engagement. Still keeping the nose of his plane up, he sailed along over a little ridge and managed to make a hazardous landing in a cleared space.

As he snapped out his pliers and feverishly tried to repair the damaged wire braces, he was wondering what was happening over the ridge. He heard a couple of explosions, and then the sharper report of rifle shots, probably from the armored car. A few minutes later, while still working on the damaged wire, he heard the roar of the green plane’s engine, and, looking up, saw it passing over him, and a spray of machine gun bullets splashed against the bowlder to his left.

Bill grabbed his rifle and ran to the shelter of the bowlder, but the green plane paid no further attention to him. It sailed away to the northeast. Evidently the men in its cockpit had made their haul from the armored car and were making away with it, and had decided to leave well enough alone.

With his wire braces repaired, Bill once more took off, circled and climbed, and skimmed back over the ridge. The armored car, he could see now, was toppled over on its side in the road.

A few rods from the spot the blue-gray plane was crumpled up like a great wounded bird. Bill picked out a suitable landing place, throttled his motor and volplaned down. Then he ran back to the road, passing the gray plane on the way. The dead pilot of the gray plane sat half upright in a weird position, his head to one side. The legs of another man protruded from the wreckage. A little mustached man was beside the plane, circling about it queerly and jabbering away and feeling his head.

“Knocked goofy,” said Bill to himself. “Well, two of ’em are dead, and that little bozo seems cuckoo. He can wait.”

He continued toward the sagging armored car. The uniformed bodies of two men, evidently guards, lay sprawled beside the car. One of them still had a rifle cradled in his arms.

The driver, although wounded, was trying to crawl down from the seat, and a fourth figure, a blond young man, sent a charge from an automatic whistling over Bill’s head, evidently believing that, since he came in a plane, he was another of the stick-up men.

Bill threw himself to the ground.

“Hey! Lay off that!” he yelled. “I’m here to help you. I recognize you from your father. You’re Ted Saxton, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” There was doubt in young Saxton’s voice.

“Well, I know your father. No use taking after that green plane now. You and the driver there seem to be in bad shape. I’ll take you in my ship to the sanatorium at Valmora, where you can get treatment. And one of those birds in the gray wreck there seems to be moving. He does not deserve it, but I’ll take him along.”

He crossed back to the wrecked gray plane. The small man with the mustache was still circling about, jabbering in Spanish. He showed no injury, but he had probably been creased badly by the fall.

He looked blankly out his black eyes when Barlow questioned him, and Bill suddenly seized and shouldered him like a sack of barley, and dumped him into the cockpit of his plane. A few moments later, with the injured Saxton and the driver as comfortable as possible under the circumstances, he was winging along toward the sanatorium at Valmora, the peaked roof of which he could see in the distance.

He made a landing, left his cargo of casualties there, and speeded back to Pampa.

“But Ted! Is he hurt badly?” asked Ruth, when he had told his remarkable story.

“Oh, I know he’ll be all right, Miss Saxton. A fragment of a grenade struck him in the head. The doctors at Valmora say they’ll patch him up all right. I’m not sure about the driver. He stopped a bullet in the side.”

“Oh, I must get to Ted!” Ruth exclaimed. “Come on, dad. We’ll fly to Valmora with Mr. Barlow.”

Saxton put in a quick telephone call to the police to scour the hills north of Pampa.

“I’m afraid they’ll have a tough time,” he said, as he pulled on a cap and hurried toward the plane with Bill and his daughter. “That’s the first time there’s been an air stick-up in New Mexico. But if Ted’s all right, I don’t even mind about the bullion.”

Bill’s plane had proceeded about twelve miles in the direction of Valmora when Ruth, gazing through the binoculars, made out a plane coming from the mountains in the northwest.

“I’ll make a landing,” Bill suggested, “and let you out, Miss Saxton. Then probably I can climb above it, and—”

But Miss Saxton was of quite another mind.

“Indeed, you will not!” she cut in. “I’m not a bit afraid. You get above them, and I’ll keep below the cowl of the machine and pot those murderers. If you could do it alone, I ought to be able to do something now. I was on the rifle team at Vassar, you know.”

Bill climbed steadily, and as the green plane flew nearer, swooped down to the rear and kept on its tail. As he passed within twenty feet of it there was a report back of him, and then another report, and still another.

The green plane seemed to stagger in the air. Its fuel tank had been perforated by the bullets, and the pilot had turned to gesticulate wildly to one of the men back of him.

It was then that, as Bill flew alongside, but a trifle in the rear to keep out of range of the machine gun, that Ruth drew a steady bead and fired again. The pilot threw up his hands.

A second member of the green plane started to reach for the joy-stick. There was another report from Bill’s plane, and the great green De Haviland spiraled down dizzily.

Ten minutes later Bill Barlow, with Ruth and her father, had made a landing and were running toward the crushed green ship, Bill put out his hand and barred Ruth’s progress. He knew that it was not a pretty sight that would meet their eyes, for the ship had caught fire, and even as they ran forward there was an explosion.

The three men of the green plane’s crew were dead, and two of them were badly burned. There was no sign of the bullion. A box of grenades had toppled out from the plane when it careened in the air, and had miraculously not exploded.

Bill gathered them up and handed them to Saxton.

“We’d better keep ’em,” he said. “No telling but that they might come in handy on a day like this. I think these birds must have a cache somewhere up there in the mountains, and I have an idea. We’d better hotfoot it to Valmora and get something out of that injured Mex if we can. He didn’t seem badly hurt, but he might pop off.”

At Valmora, the Mexican, whose name proved to be Pedro Cesar, had made a quick recovery. He was on his feet in the ward, but under guard.

Bill drew him aside.

“There’s one chance for you, Cesar,” he said. “It’s up to you what you want to do. You know your pals abandoned you this morning. They could have taken you, couldn’t they? Now I want to get some information out of you.”

The little Mexican surveyed him out of sullen black eyes.

“Me, I am no traitor,” he replied. “I fly weeth Villa. I am gentleman.”

“Then your friends are traitors,” Bill informed him. “You know what they did? They flew back over that crashed gray plane about an hour ago, and fired into the bodies they found there. You know why? They thought some of their pals might have been alive, and they didn’t want to share that gold. And they probably thought that you were one of the ones stopping their lead. Not very nice treatment, was it? But they have been captured by the State patrol, and by coming clean you can get free. You’d better come through. There was murder done there—and you’re in on it.”

Pedro Cesar seemed to have fallen for the story. He broke into a series of curses in Spanish.

“Por Dios! If they want to doubla cross me, eh? An’ go away weeth de gol’—yes, so soon night come. How many you say they arrest—de men in de green plane? Three? Ah—two more are in de mountains weeth another hair-sheep. They doubla cross them too, eh? They turn what you say State’s evidence?”

“That’s it,” Bill lied cheerfully. “They didn’t have the gold in the green plane—but in another hour the authorities will know where it’s cached in the mountains. Then you all get the works. Say, how did you birds get hold of three airships?”

“Ah! That surprise you, eh?” Pedro Cesar laughed. “You have perhaps heard of Pancho Lopez, eh—de beeg bandit chief of Sonora? Ah, I theenk you have heard so much, yes? Pancho Lopez he have de sheeps from de ol’ Villista army, an’ he hear of de gol’ being transport from Trinidad. He ees poor now, ol’ Pancho, yes. He weesh to make de one haul an’ take to de hills where no one ever find him. But Pancho he be very mad now if he not get gol’.”

“I’m afraid your friend Pancho will have to stick mad and stay mad,” Barlow told the Mexican. “But you show me where that other plane is cached in the hills, and you’ll get out of plenty trouble.”

“You carry me in de hair-sheep,” Pedro promised, “an’ I show you we gat them, ver’ queek.”

“O K,” said Bill. “But I’d like a third man along, with another rifle.”

“What’s the matter with me? Am I a cripple?” Saxton interrupted. “And don’t forget, that’s my plane you’re piloting,” he laughed.

“Maybe,” said Bill, chuckling back. “All right, get the guns, Saxton. And we have the grenades. We’ll see if we can’t rout out those birds. They must have the dough cached there.”

So, after a quick lunch at the sanatorium, Bill Barlow once more hopped off, with Pedro Cesar and Saxton in the cockpit—hopped off to the north, where Cesar claimed that his former confederates were hidden.

Saxton had orders to watch Cesar, whom Bill did not entirely trust, but the Mexican seemed to have been converted and chastened, and as they neared the mountains and Bill increased his altitude, he directed the pilot to veer to the right to avoid a machine gun mounted in the robber camp as an anti-aircraft weapon.

“Believe me, these birds have a modern organization,” said Bill. “And look, Saxton over to the right there. See that sky-blue monoplane? By golly, they’re getting ready to take off. And with the dough, I’ll bet.”

It seemed true enough. Here in a natural bowl made by a circular plain and the rimming hills was a speedy-looking monoplane with its engine already warming up. On the ground three men were gesticulating to each other, and one of them pointed up toward Bill’s ship, whereupon all of them ran for cover.

Bill swung over the plane and, taking precise aim, let go two of the bombs he had taken from the wrecked gray ship. The second one seemed to hit the monoplane squarely and tip it over on one wing.

Then Bill spiraled down in an effort to destroy the machine gun back of the bowlder before it could be manned. Cesar pointed it out, and just as he did so there came the quick rat-a-tat-a-tat of machine gun bullets.

Bill throttled his motor and swung to the right, then circled and made a landing at the far end of the field.

“That other plane’s out of commission,” he said. “We want to have one left to get away in. Down on your bellies, men, and keep to shelter. We’ll fight this action out right down here.”

He taxied his ship behind a spur of hill out of range of the machine gun. Then, rifle in hand, he held a quick conference with Saxton and Cesar.

“You folks keep in shelter behind these rocks here, and draw that bozo’s fire,” he said. “They’ve got bad medicine there, but we may be able to outmaneuver them.”

His plan was to creep up the side trail with his rifle, and try to get the machine gunner from the rear. Cesar had said that the gun was rigged on a swivel, but if one of the other three men turned it back in his direction there were plenty of rocks and bowlders behind which to take shelter, and Saxton and Cesar could then charge from the front.

Bill made his way cautiously up the mountain trail, circled to the right and picked his way down the slope. He found a friendly bowlder halfway down the slope, and to his delight could make out the hat of one of the men about the machine gun. He took careful aim and fired.

The hat disappeared, and he believed he had got his man, for one of the others took to his heels, running up the slope which led past the bowlder at a distance of about a hundred yards. Evidently he had not guessed that an enemy was behind the bowlder.

Bill drew a bead on the running man’s legs, and toppled him to the ground. But the rat-a-tat-a-tat of the machine gun broke out occasionally, proving that the machine gunner was alive and was trying to get the men in front of him.

Bill himself had not been discovered. He crept farther back and over to the right. Things were going nicely. Saxton and Cesar had a good chance if they did not show themselves too clearly, and all he had to do now was to get that gunner.

He took to his hands and knees and had topped a little rise that he thought would give him command of the machine gun position, when far to the right in the rear of the gun he saw another man creeping along. He raised his rifle and was about to fire, but then the man raised his head, and from the cap he wore Bill could see that it was Saxton.

He stood up and waved his hat at Saxton, so that the latter might not make the same mistake that he had almost made—fire on a friend. Saxton waved back, and hastened toward him.

The two of them crept back of a screen of rocks, and to their delight saw the hunched figure of the machine gunner back of the bowlder in front of them.

“We’ll fire together,” Bill suggested. “This is too easy. Then we’ll never know which bullet killed him.”

They fired. The man at the gun slumped forward. They waited a moment, but he did not move again.

“Well, that’s that,” said Bill. “I think we’ve won the field.”

He had hardly finished the sentence when a bullet spatted against a rock back of them, and another kicked up the dust at their feet. Both men threw themselves flat on the ground.

“I guess I spoke too soon,” said Bill. “I toppled a fellow a few minutes ago. He was running back up the trail, and I think I got him in the leg. He must have beat it back to some retreat for a rifle, and this is the result. Don’t show yourself, Saxton. We’ll outwait him.”

They lay there on their stomachs back of the bowlder, their rifles ready for the first sign of the remaining bandit.

But it seemed that it was always the unexpected that was happening on this eventful day. There was the roar of a motor below in the field. Bill unconsciously made himself an attractive target as he sat up and looked at Saxton sharply.

“Holy sufferin’ Moses!” he said. “That must be my ship. Maybe the third stick-up guy, or—”

He raced down straight toward the field, Saxton on his heels. As they passed the machine gun and its dead gunner they were just in time to see Barlow’s machine take to the air. At the joy-stick was Pedro Cesar.

Bill stopped and sent a rifle bullet at the plane, but the ship sailed calmly through the air, and Cesar playfully tossed a grenade over the side. It exploded a few yards away from the bewildered men on the ground.

“I’ll bet ten to one he’s loaded the loot from that sky-blue one,” shouted Bill.

He streaked over to the sagging monoplane, and found that his prediction was only too true. Pedro had also taken the box of grenades.

“My fault!” Saxton admitted. “What a dumb-bell! I should have stayed and watched him. Now the little rat’s got away with everything.”

Saxton’s crestfallen penitence touched Bill rather humorously, despite the circumstances.

“I guess it’s Pedro Cesar’s,” answered Saxton. “Cesar’s gold, Cesar’s plane, and Cesar’s bank, for all I care. But believe me, if I could get my hands on that little greaser it would be a case of ‘I’ve come to bury Cesar,’ believe you me! What’s the matter, Bill? Something else wrong?”

Bill Barlow was looking at the sky-blue monoplane as if it was bewitched, and as if he himself was bewitched along with it.

“Why—why—” he started. “By golly, man,” he almost shouted, “there’s not a thing wrong with this sky-blue ship except that this control wire is snapped. Pedro didn’t stop to examine it, the boob!” Already he was taking out his pliers. “We’ll be up in the air in less than fifteen minutes.”

He fixed the wire in record time, he and Saxton straightened up the plane, pushed it back toward the machine gun bowlder for a longer take-off, and a few seconds later the motor was whirring.

“Just a minute,” called back Bill, as he disappeared behind the bowlder. He returned with the machine gun and started to lift it into the cockpit.

“It won’t be rigged up as snug as my old Browning,” he explained; “but it can shoot, and there’s a drum in it already. And this ship looks like a lulu. If I don’t overtake that grease ball before he gets to the border my name isn’t Lucky Bill Barlow. This toy comet ought to be able to do a hundred and a half going backward.”

At Valmora, on the way to the border, Bill throttled his motor and began to volplane.

“What’s the idea?” asked Saxton.

“Wait!” Bill commanded. He made the landing.

“Get out, old pal,” he told the banker. “I’m alone this time, boy. Cesar is alone, and this is my ship, and the war is solo from this minute, until I come back with the dough.”

He stuck out his hand and patted Saxton on the shoulder.

“So long, old pal,” he said. Then he gave ’er the gun and the sky-blue monoplane went roaring down the field.

IV

Beneath the cottonwoods in front of the sanatorium at Valmora, Frank C. Saxton and his daughter waited nervously. An hour elapsed. Two hours.

Saxton was shaking his head. There was concern in the gray eyes of Ruth. Three hours. And a half.

The sun was setting behind the ridge to the west when Ruth sprang to her feet, her gray eyes alight.

“I hear it!” she yelled. “Oh, daddy! Daddy! It must be—be Billy!”

Out of the sky to the south skimmed a sky-blue monoplane. It roared overhead; then the plane, with a throttled motor, came into the wind and made a quick bank to the right, and a few seconds later was bouncing gently along the broad exercise field of the sanatorium.

As it taxied to a stop, out jumped William C. Barlow. He hailed his friends and pointed to the cockpit.

“The bullion!” he announced proudly. “Better leave it here and set a guard till morning. We’ll take it to Pampa in time to open the bank.”

Saxton put up the back of his hand and wiped his forehead.

“I’m getting to believe whatever you say, Bill Barlow,” he announced. “If you say it, it must be so. But where’s the other plane—my plane?”

“Oh, yes—your plane,” mimicked Bill, grinning. “I brought it back for you. Here it is—about the biggest part of it.” He handed Saxton a fragment which looked like a piece of charcoal.

“That’s why it took me so long,” he explained. “I had to wait until the darned thing burned before I could get at the bullion. But I’ve got a ship now that makes yours look like just what it is—a pile of junk!”

“You win!” said Saxton, throwing his hands in the air in a burlesque sign of surrender. “You could win—all the stakes—any game you play.”

“I just might take you up on that,” Bill replied, and he looked meaningly at Ruth Saxton.

She did not drop her eyes this time. She was looking right back at him with that straight gray gaze of hers, and her eyes said more than words could ever express.