"I wouldn't even dare guess!" the English-born air ace replied. "What do you hope?"
"That the lad we contact at San Fernando has a copper disc with numbers that add up to forty-five!" Dawson told him.
"What?" young Farmer gasped. "Forty-five? But, Dave, the number is—"
"Sure, forty-one!" Dawson cut in. "But don't you catch on, pal? If the number is forty-five, it means that the lad is a phoney. And that means that maybe we'll get some excitement out of this aerial messenger boy job."
"Rot, and very much so!" Freddy snapped angrily. "Come off it, Dave! This is very serious business, and you are absolutely balmy to even hope that things will go wrong. Just remember what Colonel Welsh said, Dave. If one of these sealed envelopes should fall into Axis hands, he'd rather put a bullet in his brain than go on living. Stop being a blasted fool, old thing! It's not a bit like you at all!"
"Okay, okay, papa!" Dawson chuckled. "Consider that you have up-ended me and given me the shingle where it counts most. Just the same, I hate to think of going stark, raving mad in the cockpit of a Wright-powered Vultee."
"Well, if that's all that's bothering you, you can put it out of your mind at once," Freddy snapped, "because you were that way a long, long time ago!"
"Oh, yeah?" Dawson shouted.
"Yeah!" Freddy Farmer replied. "But definitely!"
They left it that way for the next fifteen minutes or so. At the end of that time the Vultee was well out of sight of all land, and Dawson was keeping it on course with instruments. At the end of that time, too, the southern part of the heavens began to mist and fog up and gradually change to a copperish gray. The straight line that marked where the blue of the sky ended and the copperish gray began told Dawson that a line squall was moving across the Caribbean. But five minutes later the little twinge of uneasiness that had come to him melted away, because the copperish gray moved westward and not up northward toward the Vultee. However, because of the silly mood that had gripped him since leaving Puerto Rico, he had to voice a crazy thought.