“Here’s wishing you luck, Tim,” said Tiny. “I’m going to roll in now. I flew in from the west today with the mail and then they sent me on out here. It’s been a long day but I’ll see you the first thing in the morning. Good night.”
“Good night, Tiny,” replied Tim.
After the mail flyer had lumbered up to his room, Tim went out to the hotel porch where he had laid the salvaged parts from the engine. He picked them up and lugged them up to his room. There, under the yellow light from a kerosene lamp, he strained over the broken bits. When he finally completed his minute examination, there was a grim smile on his lips.
After breakfast with Lewis the next morning, Tim phoned the News office, and putting a bug in the managing editor’s ear that he had stumbled onto a real clue, got permission to free lance for the rest of the day.
Tim carefully wrapped up the engine parts and carried them to the field where he loaded them into his plane. Lewis was busy supervising operations for the crating and shipping of the remains of the mail plane and with a wave of his hand, Tim dodged over the trees that bordered the pasture and headed for Prairie City, two hundred miles away, where the state university was located.
Noon found Tim closeted with the head of the engineering school of the university, an international authority on electricity. Tim told his story in quick, clear sentences and in less than fifteen minutes the famous scientist had a graphic picture of what must have taken place in the midnight sky over the Cedar River valley.
For two hours the flying reporter and the scientist worked behind closed doors while messenger boys hurried to and from the telegraph offices, delivering telegrams that were eagerly grasped and hastily opened.
By late afternoon Tim was winging his way back to Atkinson, a smile of conquest lighting up his face. In his pocket was a paper with the secret of the destruction of the air mail plane, in his mind was a plan to catch the sky bandits.
When Tim reached Atkinson and entered the big editorial office of the News, he found it deserted for it was early evening and the staff on an afternoon newspaper completes its work before 6 o’clock. A scrub woman, busy at one end of the long room, paid no attention to the flying reporter as he sat down at his desk.
Tim sat before his battered typewriter until far into the night, recording his strange story. He told how the mail plane, speeding through the night over the valley of the Cedar River, had fallen earthward in a death spin, its motor silent, its pilot paralyzed in his seat while over the twisting, falling plane hovered its destroyer.