In one corner of the square of silk was a dark, scorched space.
“Gee!” said Jimmy. “That fire was a lot nearer getting Warren Long than he intimated. But that is like him. He would hardly have mentioned it if he had had a leg burned off. If his parachute got scorched like that, he certainly had a close call himself. I know that, all right.”
Jimmy spread the square of silk on his desk and smoothed it out with his hand. It had evidently been roughly and hastily cut from the parachute. The edges were jagged and uneven. “I’ll get some woman to trim these edges and overcast them,” thought Jimmy. “Then the silk can’t unravel. And if I ever should want to use it as a handkerchief, I could.”
A sudden thought came to him. Hastily he folded and thrust the bit of silk into the envelope. Then he reached for the Morning Press.
“I wonder what the paper says about the affair,” he muttered.
The item he was searching for Jimmy found on the front page, near the bottom of column six. It was a brief story, hardly three inches long, telling how Long’s plane had caught fire and how the pilot had jumped from the burning ship, after finding that he could not extinguish the blaze. Jimmy read the story and frowned.
“Some country correspondent who doesn’t know a good story when he sees one sent that in,” growled Jimmy, indignantly. “Why, it’s evident from Warren’s letter that he had a most startling experience, with that flaming ship diving straight at him, while he was utterly powerless to help himself. That’s great human interest stuff. It ought to be good for half a column any day. And if we had the details, I’ll bet there’d be a front page spread in it.”
With Jimmy, to think was to act. He reached for the telephone.
“Please give me the Morning Press,” he told the telephone operator.
A moment later he was talking to the city editor of that paper.