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.