Billings and Cosgrave returned to the old hangar. Its vast emptiness oppressed them so that they could hardly speak. They would have to wait hours and hours to know what all their work would accomplish. They looked forward to the long wait with dread.
Bert came up in a car and asked if they had seen Kiwi. Surely by now he would have returned to the hangar. But no one had seen him since the rain storm that had seemed, for a time, to blot out the Skipper’s chances for a take-off. Bert hurried back to the other field with the hope that he might still be there.
In the small room at the back of the hangar, Connors was busy with his wireless set. With the earphones on he bent over his instruments at the table and tried to pick up the first message to come back from the plane. From time to time the click of his sending key could be heard through the partition.
Both Billings and Cosgrave were absentmindedly picking up the scattered evidences of the hurried departure from the hangar. They had closed the big doors, when Billings, very tense, suddenly swung around and confronted Cosgrave.
“Cosgrave, you and me have been working hard on this job for a long time now, and there have been times when I thought you were up to some crooked business. The plane is off and away. If anything happens to those boys that I can trace to you, I’m going to make you the sorriest man that ever walked onto this field.”
Cosgrave turned a bright red at all this, but said nothing for a few minutes, while Billings glowered at him. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he said:
“Well, Limey, I think I can trust you. I don’t want you to mention this to no one, but when I have told you I think you will understand.
“At the beginning I was offered money—and a lot of it—to try and stop, or postpone, this flight. I was in a jam and needed money, and I thought I could do something—nothing serious, you understand—that would look accidental. But the longer I worked for those two men, the more I realized that I couldn’t go through with it.
“Then when the Kiwi started flying with them and came so close to getting cracked up the time they lost the wheel, I phoned the people who were trying to buy me and said, ‘Nothing doing.’ And Billings, you can believe me or not, but since that time I have worked even harder than you to make this flight a success. There is nothing about that plane now, as far as I know, that isn’t in perfect condition.”