Gypsy Flight / A Mystery Story for Girls

A Mystery Story for Girls
By ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co. Chicago
COPYRIGHT 1935 BY THE REILLY & LEE CO. PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
Rosemary Sample adjusted her jaunty cap carefully, smoothed out her well-tailored suit, then lowering her head, stepped from her trans-continental airplane.
Oh yes, that was Rosemary’s plane. Rosemary was still young, and she looked even younger than her years. A slender slip of a girl was Rosemary, rather pretty, too, with a touch of natural color and a dimple in each cheek, white even teeth, smiling eyes of deepest blue.
Strange sort of person to have a huge bi-motored plane with two 555 horse-power motors and a cruising speed of one hundred and seventy miles per hour. It cost seventy thousand dollars did that airplane. Yet this slip of a girl was its captain, its conductor, its everything but pilot, as long as it hung in air. Rosemary was its stewardess—and that meant a very great deal.
Rosemary stepped across the cement runway with a buoyant tread. “Life,” she thought with a happy tilt of her head, “is just wonderful! It is perfection itself.”
Rosemary loved perfection. And where may one find perfection of high degree if not in a great metropolitan airport? Those giant silver birds of the air, their motors drumming in perfect unison, wheeling into position for flight—how perfect! The touch of genius, the brain and brawn of the world’s greatest has gone into their making. And as to the care of them, Rosemary knew that the most valuable horse in the world never received more perfect treatment.
The depot, too, was perfect. Its hard white floor was spotless. The ticket sellers, the loitering aviators, even the black-faced redcaps somehow appeared to fit into a perfect picture.
“The travelers and their luggage,” she whispered, “they too fit in. No shabby ones. No drab ones. Per—”
She did not finish for of a sudden, as if caught and banged against a post, her picture was wrecked, for a young man apparently unsuited to the place had dashed through the depot’s outer door and, grasping her by the arm, said in a low hoarse whisper: