“It’s so dam real that I’ll pay a little reward of five thousand bucks to the boy that brings the machine back again,” Matthews said.
“Hard luck,” said Potter. “But why the devil should anybody steal an aeroplane? A white elephant would be as easy to hide, and they couldn’t sell it. Get pinched the minute they tried that. I don’t get the idea.”
“Didn’t somebody steal a jail once?” Eldredge asked.
“Did they leave anything behind?” Potter asked, “anything for the police to smell of and run off on the trail?”
“We haven’t found a burnt match that Mullens couldn’t account for. It was a clean job. They just appeared—and then—” He whistled and waved his hand.
“What do the police have to offer?”
Matthews looked disgusted. “I don’t think they believe I ever had an aeroplane,” he said.
“If ’planes get as common as automobiles,” said O’Mera, who had strolled up, “the police will have to have a flying squadron of Zeppelins outfitted with enormous butterfly-nets. Some game that, eh? Chasing a stolen aeroplane a few thousand feet above ground and snaffling it in a bug-net.”
“You fellows are joshing me,” Matthews complained. “You wouldn’t be so darn funny if somebody had run off with twenty thousand dollars of yours.”
“Maybe the Kaiser’s army of German reservists who were going to seize the country have grabbed it?”