“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.