“Maybe it is, but—well, laugh if you want to, I’m uneasy as blazes about those girls!”
Bill caught up with him as they ran down the steps of the side porch and headed out to the hangar.
“It must be awful to be in love. The girls are all right. Dorothy is an A-1 pilot. I ought to know. I taught her myself.”
Osceola said nothing more until they had passed the garage and stables and were crossing the flat meadow where the Bolton hangar was located. “Thank goodness, Frank has run out that Ryan of yours,” he exclaimed as they came into view of a two-seater monoplane parked before the open doors of the converted haybarn.
“Getting lazy in your old age, are you?” jeered Bill.
“No, but I’ll admit the sooner we’re off and up in the hills, the better pleased I’ll be.”
“Well, you can hop right in, old fuss budget. While you were working on your school plan, early this morning, I came out here and went over the bus from nose to tailplane. Pull out those wheel blocks and carry them into the rear cockpit with you. Meanwhile I’ll show you how the new inertia starter I’ve rigged her with can swing a prop. Make it snappy, big chief—this is an emergency patrol—the women must be saved at all costs!”
Bill adopted a mock-heroic attitude and roared with laughter at Osceola’s disgust. Twenty minutes later, Bill, at the controls of the Ryan, sighted a rectangular patch of light green framed in the darker green of the Connecticut hills twenty-five hundred feet below the speeding plane. He clapped a pair of glasses to his eyes and the woodlot sprang up at him. It seemed he could almost reach out and pluck the flowers that dotted the high grass. Then he turned his gaze to the upper corner of the field.
There lay Dorothy Dixon’s small amphibian, parked near the road which wound up the wooded valley. Close by, a motor car was drawn up at the edge of the field. For a moment he failed to sight either Dorothy, or her pretty Seminole friend, Deborah Lightfoot.
“Under the trees beyond the plane!”