From the looks of things, Perkins, blinded by the storm and driven far off his course, had rammed straight into the side of the mountain. The nose of the big biplane, with the motor, had been bashed back into the express cockpit and the landing gear had folded up.
Tim fairly leaped up the side of the fuselage and into the pilot’s cockpit, but Perkins was nowhere in sight. On the padded leather seat Tim found a folded sheet of paper. With eager fingers he grasped it and read its message at a glance.
“Hello, Tim,” he read. “The first time we met you won; this time fate brought the mail into my hands and right now I’m richer by some $500,000, which will keep me out of mischief for some time. I just happened to be crossing the Great Smokies this morning and saw the mail, which had cracked up in the storm last night. Don’t you wish you had a helicopter on your plane to lift you off this ledge? But I don’t think the pilot is badly hurt. See you later, and remember, the score is even.”
There was no need for Tim to read the name signed to the note. The Sky Hawk, profiting by the vagaries of the storm, had struck again!
Ralph, who had gone around to the far side of the plane, cried out. When Tim reached his chum he found him under one wing, bending over the unconscious form of the mail pilot.
There was a jagged cut on one side of Perkins’ head where he must have come in contact with some part of the plane in the crackup. His face was a grayish-white and Tim instantly realized that he was in need of expert medical attention.
“How badly do you think he’s hurt?” asked Ralph.
“I don’t know,” replied Tim. “He’s got a nasty crack on the head and it may be serious and it may not. Get me the first aid kit in our ship and I’ll dress this wound on his head.”
In less than five minutes Tim had dressed the cut and with Ralph’s assistance, had carried Perkins into the sunlight where his clothes, still damp from the rain of the night before, would have a chance to dry. He was breathing slowly but regularly and they forced a little water between his lips. While they were working over Perk, Tim showed the Sky Hawk’s note to Ralph, and their lips were drawn in hard, straight lines as they realized the power of the unknown bandit of the skyways.
Both Tim and Ralph knew that their real task, that of making a successful takeoff from the narrow ledge, was their biggest problem and they turned to it with determination. With Perkins taken care of temporarily, they made sure that the remaining registered mail was O. K. and then transferred it to their own plane. After that they started their survey of the shelf on which they had landed. On one side was the mountain, on the other a drop of nearly 1,000 feet. The surface of the shelf was fairly even but it was only about 400 feet long, far too short for a takeoff, especially with three in the Lark as there would be on the return trip.