Arriving at the ground where the birdmen held forth, he found a number of bronzed young fellows squatting around a fire, and swapping stories of possible past experiences. As Bud came up and stood there, curious glances were cast upon him. Perhaps most of them jumped to the conclusion that he must be the representative of some important newspaper, for Bud was a pretty husky sort of a fellow for his age; and young blood is often sought after by the great metropolitan dailies.
So Bud presently dropped down, and sat there listening. He drank in all he heard those aviators saying. One of them, it seemed, had been across the sea, and taken part in some of the dangerous forays, when Allied aeroplanes made daring raids on fortified towns or military concentration camps in the rear of the enemy forces, and his reminiscences of the thrilling scenes upon which he had gazed held Bud spellbound.
Others in the little group had not been so fortunate in seeing actual hostilities, but each man in turn narrated certain adventures that had befallen him; for even in piping times of peace aviators meet with perils calculated to make a stirring story.
One man in particular interested Bud. At the time he hardly knew why this should be so, for they were all strangers to him. Afterwards he was inclined to believe there must have been some sort of intuition about it, causing him to listen to everything this air pilot was saying.
His name seemed to be Johnson, for Bud heard him called that several times. The conversation had turned upon odd incidents connected with meeting people under peculiar conditions, and as he listened Bud heard Johnson saying:
“Queer how people bob up that you’d never expect to meet. Now, today while we were on the road here from the station, with the truck carrying our ’plane, I had a thing like that happen to me. Two years back it came about that I was flying at county fairs down in Florida. I did it as a means for making ready money, because I wanted to get hold of a new model hydroaeroplane that I was wild to own. My companion in the Fair venture was a fellow I never really liked, though he certainly had plenty of grit, and knew a heap about this flying business.
“Well, we separated in the end, because I couldn’t stand for some of his crooked ways. From that day to this I did not see him once; yet today, when we passed a little old house on the road here from the railway station, who should I see looking from the second-story window, and staring at all the aviation squad moving along, but my former partner of the Florida county fair flights. Which shows how small this old world is, after all. Why, I wouldn’t have been any more surprised if I’d landed on top of Mount Washington, and come face to face there with Luther Gregory!”
Bud almost fell over, he received such a shock at hearing the aviator calmly mention that name. Luther Gregory, the wild son of Uncle Reuben, the very man whose scheming had caused the scouts all that trouble while on the road to the mobilization camp—it came to Bud almost like an inspiration that in this astonishing way he had struck a clue.
Through his brain chased a dozen brilliant thoughts. Why, if Luther Gregory had really been the employer whose money had hired that clever trickster in the flivver to do everything in his power to obstruct the progress of Blake and his chums, didn’t it stand to reason that the chief plotter must have come on the ground in order to have a hand in the final attempt to keep Felix from making up with his uncle?
Bud wanted to shake hands with himself, he felt so tickled. For some little time he sat there and communed with himself, laying out various plans whereby he and Hugh and Blake might yet win the game that had seemed to be going against them.