“He gassed us,” he said simply. “That’s the secret of his power to send planes and pilots to their destruction. He only strikes on cloudy days when he can hide in the clouds. Just before his intended victim comes along, he releases the gas in the clouds. The unsuspecting pilot runs right into the gas and puff! That’s all there is to it. Simple, isn’t it?”
Tim was speechless with the horror of the Sky Hawk’s method.
“Simple, yes,” he managed to say, “but terrible.”
“I’ll admit that,” grinned Ralph, and after tomorrow, if the weather’s cloudy, there won’t be any more Sky Hawk.
“What do you mean?”
“That we’ll get the Sky Hawk. Now that we know his methods, we have the upper hand. This terror of the skies is about at the end of his string.”
When they landed at Atkinson a doctor quickly brought the express flyer back to consciousness although he was rushed to a hospital for treatment to check the ravages of the gas which he had breathed. Ralph had been lucky and the slight whiff he had gotten had knocked him out only temporarily with no lasting danger.
They reported to Hunter, studied the weather forecasts for the next day, and completed their simple preparations for the capture of the Sky Hawk.
The morning edition of the News carried a carefully worded story how a special plane was to leave Atkinson that morning on a dash across the plains with a heavy shipment of specie needed by a bank at the western terminal of the division. The $1,000,000 plane, the paper called it.
When Tim and Ralph wheeled the Good News from the hangar that morning, a truck was coming through the main gate with uniformed policemen on the running boards. It was the work only of a minute to transfer the two dummy specie chests, heavy iron-bound boxes, from the truck to the cabin of the Good News. They were leaving nothing to chance for the Sky Hawk might have accomplices on the field.