“Nuts, I’m serious!” Dave snapped. “I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking about poor Tracey. There is the key, Freddy. Poor Tracey. No matter how much I try to get away from it, I keep coming back to the firm belief that he gave us the key to the whole business, in those four words that we think added up to Albuquerque.”
“You don’t think so, now?” Freddy asked.
“I don’t know what to think!” Dawson muttered savagely. “He probably was just pronouncing Albuquerque slowly so’s we’d be sure to get it. But why? Tell me why.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Freddy replied with an unhappy shake of his head.
“So that’s what gets me,” Dave said. “Why use his last bit of strength to tell us to tell Colonel Welsh that he came from Albuquerque, when Colonel Welsh already knew that? And that word, southern? Why southern Albuquerque? It doesn’t make sense, Freddy. I’m darned afraid that we didn’t get it right, that we muffed what was really the key to this whole mystery.”
“Well, now that you bring it up,” Freddy Farmer said slowly, “I must confess that I haven’t been at all satisfied with our deductions on what he said. But he repeated it several times, and it sounded the same each time.”
“I know,” Dave said heavily. “But let’s both keep it in our minds. I have a hunch that we were all wet on that. I think that something will come to us out of the blue, and then poor Tracey’s dying words will make sense.”
“Well, there’s still Second Lieutenant Marble,” Freddy Farmer grunted. “I refuse, though, to let my hopes get too high about him. But of course there is a chance that he can explain a lot of things, or at least enough for us to get working on.”
The two youths lapsed into mutual silence and were content with their own thoughts as the big Flying Fortress drilled its way through the air toward Brownsville. As a matter of fact, neither of them spoke for some fifteen minutes or so, and then only when the big bomber’s Flight Engineer came past them on his way aft.
“Anything we can do to help, Lieutenant Kelley?” Dave asked with a smile. “We sort of feel as if we were cheating on the job, just sitting back here and taking it easy.”