Atkinson, with its bustling streets, its busy factories and 200,000 inhabitants, was soon left behind. For almost an hour Tim held to his course. When he sighted the silver ribbon that was the Cedar River, he swung south until he picked up the village of Auburn. It was little more than a cluster of houses on the right bank of the mighty river.
There was no regular landing field at the village but Tim found a pasture a mile back from the river that looked large enough for his purpose. He stalled down, taking his time. There was no use risking a crackup with his new ship. The pasture was cuppy and there was a slough on one side but Tim killed his speed quickly after he set the Lark down and pulled up less than twenty feet from a fence.
Tim had sighted the wreck of the air mail in a timber patch half way to the village. After landing his own craft it took him less than ten minutes to find what was left of the mail. There was little in the pile of wreckage to resemble the sturdy, silver craft which had left the Atkinson airport the night before. It was just a heap of tangled wires and struts, scraps of canvas and twisted rods. It looked like a crackup, with the mail looted after the smash, but to Tim’s carefully trained news sense there was something more. He couldn’t have defined his feelings in so many words but he played his hunch and examined the remains of the big plane. He had almost completed his examination when something on the motor caught his attention. He bent over it and when he straightened up there was a new gleam of interest in his eyes.
With the aid of a farm boy Tim managed to get a fence post under the motor and half rolled it over. A few minutes more of hard work and he succeeded in removing several parts from the engine.
By the time the flying reporter had completed his task the light was fading fast and, satisfied with his survey of the wrecked plane, Tim hurried toward the village.
Auburn was small but friendly and he soon found out what little the residents of the valley knew.
The east bound mail usually roared over the village about 1 o’clock in the morning, speeding through the night at better than one hundred miles an hour. But that morning the mail plane had failed to go over. That, in itself, was not unusual, for occasionally bad weather forced the cancellation of the trip. Tim, by careful inquiries, learned that one old man, living about two miles from the village, had heard the sound of a motor. His attention had been attracted by the high-pitched drone for the song of the mail was a heavy throbbing that once heard is seldom forgotten.
It had been mid-day before a farmer had found the wreckage of the mail, its pilot trapped in the cockpit, the registered mail sacks, with a big shipment of currency, looted.
Tim had enough material for his first story. Using the one long distance telephone wire in the village, he got in touch with the News office in Atkinson and dictated a detailed story. To spice it up, he added a hint about a mystery plane. It would make good reading.
The flying reporter had scarcely finished telephoning when the heavy throbbing of the motor of a plane echoed from the clouds. Hurrying out into the street from the telephone office, Tim could discern the riding lights of a mail plane as the pilot, hunting for a place to land, circled over the village.