“I mean that I don’t, worse luck. What I mean is that the fellow who ought to be suspected is probably above suspicion. He’s somebody you know well and meet every day. The kind of man who would have the enterprise to think of stealing an aeroplane is mighty apt to be the man you invite to dinner.”
“You’ll have me suspecting everybody I know.”
“While you are making motors for the Signal Corps,” said Downs, soberly, “that’s exactly what you must do. So far as your work is concerned, treat every living soul as if you knew he was a German spy.”
“It seems as if a thing as big as a hydro-aeroplane ought to be found,” Potter said.
“It’s got to be found,” said Downs. “Not only for the protection of the industrial plants in Detroit, but think of the danger it throws over the ship-canal at the Flats and the channel into Lake Erie. They could even work east as far as the Welland. An aeroplane and a few tons of explosive could come pretty close to bottling up the commerce of the Lakes, Mr. Waite.... And I’ve a notion that’s the big game.... Our ore comes down the Lakes. Stop the ore and you stop the steel-mills. Then what?”
“I guess,” said Potter, slowly, “that we’re really in the war at last.”
“The country will wake up some morning to a dazing realization of it,” Downs said, as one states a fact which he dreads but knows to be inevitable.
CHAPTER XIX
Hildegarde von Essen returned reluctantly to Detroit late in June, some two weeks before Potter Waite, his work in Washington having borne fruit and the fruit been harvested, came to put in motion the gigantic new industry which was to mean so much to his city—and to the whole world. Hildegarde came home with dragging steps and black forebodings. For months she had tried to forget Detroit, forget her father, put from her mind that searing knowledge of her father’s infamy. She had succeeded but poorly. People at Palm Beach had found her eccentric—flighty they had called her. She had been flighty. There was no absurdity she would not attempt in her demand for excitement and restlessness; she caused talk; she attracted few—even of the younger men, for, somehow, they felt uncomfortable in her presence. She was never still, demanded action always, and cared little how outrageous to convention that action might be. And she was changeable. In an instant, without perceptible cause, she would descend from reckless deviltry to somber moroseness. Even her beauty, her compelling magnetism, her known wealth, did not suffice to hold admirers. One young man announced his firm belief that she was a trifle balmy, and that, if she weren’t, he’d be hanged if her gait wasn’t too tricky for him to harness up to her. It was the general opinion. The same opinion prevailed later at Pinehurst, at Old Point, in Washington. Who was there to guess that a young girl was ridden by such an Old Man of the Sea?
Her father forbade her to come home without his permission, and she had not intended to come home until that meeting with Potter Waite in Washington had made Detroit a magnet with a power she could not resist, no matter how much she dug in her little heels and hung back. . . . She must be near him; must be where she could see him, feel his existence. He called to her in his vexed heart and the call was carried to her own heart.... So she went home.