They began making wider circles. The strange plane was lost to view when, with a suddenness that was startling, the girl gripped Willie’s arm to exclaim:
“There! Right down there it is!”
Jeanne had wakened from her sleep in that strange, fragrant bed two hours before. For a long time she had lain there wondering how this affair was to end. She had all but dozed off again when she was wakened by the familiar and, to her at this time, startling sound of an airplane motor.
“My motor!” There was no mistaking that. She knew the sound too well. At once she went into a panic.
“My airplane!” she all but wailed. “My so beautiful big dragon fly! Those terrible people will try to fly it away, and they will wreck it!”
At once she was torn between two desires—the wish to preserve her choicest treasure and her desire to serve Danby Force and his wonderful little city.
If she went to the spies now and offered to fly them across the border, they would permit her to do so, she was sure of that. But would she do it?
“No, oh no!” she sobbed low. “I must not!” She stopped her ears that she might not hear her motor and be tempted too much.
That was how it happened that when Willie and Rosemary came zooming down from the sky to land upon that narrow pasture, she did not hear them at all, and had no notion that they had arrived.
Hugo had Jeanne’s motor well warmed up and was preparing to fly away when Willie’s airplane came to a standstill squarely in their path.