“Mystery and adventure, those were the words she used.” Mystery and adventure. Well, this day had not been without its mystery. There was the strange man, Danby Force, and his urgent need for going somewhere. Then too there was the dark woman with the bag which she had all but refused to trust away from her, even in the locked compartment of a trans-continental plane. What could she have in that bag? The girl thought of one instance when it had been believed that high explosives carried in a bag on an air-liner had brought disaster to a score of persons. “But of course it would not be that,” she told herself.
Rising from her place, she moved back to where the dark-faced one rode. She seemed fast asleep. But was this only a pose? She could not tell. Someone forward beckoned to her. Routine duties were resumed.
The hours passed quietly. At five o’clock they were over the Rockies. Marvelous moment! The golden sun was sinking over the distant prairies. The mountains, half white with snow, half green with forests, lay beneath them. They were beyond the timber line.
Suddenly the co-pilot’s light blinked at the back of the cabin.
“Signaling for me. I wonder why.” She moved swiftly forward.
“A storm roaring up the mountains from the west.” Mark Morris, the young co-pilot, spoke in short jerky sentences. “Going down here. Landing field of a sort. Laid out on the plateau. Hunting lodge below. No real danger. Get straps hooked up. Usual stuff.”
Rosemary understood. She passed swiftly along the aisle. A word, a whisper, a smile, that quiet, care-free air of hers did the work.
“Forced landing. What of that?” This was what the passengers read in her face.
What indeed? They swooped downward, bumped with something of a shock, bumped more lightly, glided forward, then came to a standstill.
The tall dark woman sprang to her feet, threw open the door, then swung herself down. She was wearing low shoes and sheer silk stockings. She landed squarely in eighteen inches of snow.