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.