CHAPTER SIX
Several days after his flight with supplies to the marooned village in the Cedar river valley, Tim had an unexpected visitor. He looked up from his work to find a tall, curly haired man of not more than thirty years of age, standing beside his desk.
“Are you Tim Murphy?” inquired the visitor. Tim nodded.
“I’m Kurt Blandin, boss of the Ace flying circus,” replied the other. “I hear one of the boys treated you rather roughly the other day and I thought I’d drop in and invite you to come and see us again.”
Tim thought he noted a peculiar, strained quality in the other’s voice, and he deliberated his answer.
“I’ll run out some day,” he said. “As a matter of fact I couldn’t see any reason why I was given the cold shoulder when I was out the first time.”
Blandin laughed and Tim found himself rather liking the other when he smiled.
“An air circus,” he said, “is bound to have some accidents and sometimes we aren’t treated any too well in the newspapers. So you can’t blame the mechanic for giving you the bum’s rush. But everything will be O. K. the next time you call.” With that Blandin breezed out of the office and Tim stared after him blankly.
Somewhere he had seen the face before. There were familiar lines about the mouth, a peculiar little scar over the right eye and a hardness of the voice that once heard would never be forgotten.
He forced his thoughts back to his work but Blandin and the Ace air circus troubled him. What were they doing at Atkinson? Could there be any connection between them and the Sky Hawk?