“He walks as if he were half blind. Poor ‘Prince!’” Meg sympathized. “What could have happened?”
Johnny would have given much to know the answer. For some time to come it was to remain a veiled secret.
“The mystery ship,” Johnny thought as he watched that airplane glide away toward the clouds. Then he murmured low, “Mystery wings.”
“‘Mystery wings!’ What makes you say that?” Meg whispered.
“Because that’s the way I think of a plane,” he replied soberly. “You can’t say the planes of an airplane. Don’t sound right. Why not wings of a plane? And, for my part, every plane that passes over my head has wings of mystery.”
“You’re queer,” was Meg’s only reply.
CHAPTER VIII
STRANGE PASSENGERS
Among the Hillcrest fans feeling was running high. That something strange and rather terrible had happened to their new and quite marvelous pitcher, they appeared to realize. “But what did happen?” they were asking. “Who’s to blame? Who were the men in that plane?” Two men had been seen. They were not close enough to be recognized. Had the Centralia crowd hired them to heckle the new pitcher? This they found it difficult to believe. The friendliest of relations had always existed between the two small cities, even though there was a keen rivalry. “But who? Who? Who?” they were asking on every side. The mystery of the dark-skinned pitcher from the laboratories deepened.
As for Doug Danby, on whose shoulders rested Hillcrest’s hopes of victory, he found no time for solving mysteries.
“Fred, old boy,” he said to Fred Frame, “you’ll have to go in there and win the game. And you can!” He gave him a slap on the back. “If—”