“I hadn’t been at it long before he slid in one night, and don’t you believe that I wasn’t ready for flight then. He stayed over one night, but the next he was off just after dark, and me after him. I thought he was never going to stop flying. We made about fifty miles an hour, and by daybreak I figured we must be somewhere in Wyoming. He landed in the mountains just as the dawn began to break, and I dropped down a few miles away.
“At dark I was ready again, up in the air circling around. He made for this place straight as a string, swooped down a little after midnight, and then blamed if I didn’t lose him. Seemed as if the earth had just opened and swallowed him up, and I haven’t seen hide or hair of him since. You see, I’m up against it for fair, and when one of you gents says, ‘it’s the airship,’ like as though you’d seen one around here before, I thought perhaps you’d glimpsed the other fellow’s, and maybe you could help me out.”
As he finished, the young inspector looked inquiringly from one to the other of the two Yale men. He retained his air of careless nonchalance, but only by a palpable effort. Deep down underneath it there was an expression of anxious appeal in his eyes. It was quite evident that he was, as he had said, “up against it for fair”; otherwise he would never have confided so promptly in two total strangers, and Dick had a very strong inclination to help him out. But could he?
Not being in the least slow, Merriwell had at once sensed the entire situation. The mystery of Scott Randolph was a mystery no longer. Bert Holton’s straightforward story had cleared it up completely. He was a smuggler, pure and simple. Amazingly clever, to be sure, and conducting his operations on a huge scale, he was none the less a smuggler, and his extremely plausible story of manufacturing diamonds had been made up out of whole cloth to cover his real doings.
A faint flush mounted into Dick’s face as he realized how he had been duped, and for a moment he would have given a good deal to be able to put this clever officer on Randolph’s trail. But could he? There was that unfortunate word of honor which he had given and which he could not break. Moreover, such was Scott Randolph’s extraordinary charm of manner and likableness that, in spite of everything, Merriwell did not quite like the notion of turning him over to the law.
It was Buckhart who solved the problem. Bound by no promise of silence, knowing nothing of the diamond hoax, his mind was so full of what they had seen the night before that the consequence of his words did not occur to him before he blurted them out.
“Why, sure, bucko,” he said quickly. “We saw an airship fly out of these very mountains last night.”
A gleam of excitement leaped into Holton’s keen eyes.
“You did?” he cried. “What time? Which way did it go?”
“About eleven o’clock,” the Texan answered promptly, “It flew northward.”