The truth is, a city’s detective force does not confine its activities to the city’s limits. The crooks that make a city their home belong to that city. If they choose to leave it for a time, certain of the city’s hounds of justice are likely to camp on their trails.
Summer is the time for the migration of evil doers. They thrive on crowds. In a crowd a purse may be snatched, a hold-up perpetrated, even murder done, and the criminal may at once lose himself in that crowd.
In winter crowds are found only in cities. Summer sees country parks, carnivals and fairgrounds thronged with people. The crooks prey upon these crowds just as the pike does on a school of perch.
Some city police officers are content to spend their lives patrolling a beat. They have their place and contribute their bit to the city’s happiness and safety. Others ride about in squad cars listening for trouble. Still others, like Drew Lane and Tom Howe, restless souls, are by nature free lances. They know hundreds of evil doers by sight and are ever clinging doggedly to their heels.
It was even so now. Having become aware of the exit of a dangerous gang of professional criminals from the city, they had followed. And here they were.
If you have read that other book, The Arrow of Fire, I need not tell you that Drew Lane, not many months out of college, impersonated a natty college youth, and Tom Howe, slight, stooped, and freckled, had prepared himself to play the role of a country boy come to the “Greatest of All Carnivals.”
And now here they were gathered in Johnny’s tent, for a time completely off the trail of Greasy Thumb and his gang, awaiting the break of “something big.”
Even as they waited, not ten miles away Johnny’s old pal, Curlie Carson, was preparing to land his plane in an unknown field at night, forced down by a voice in the air, and with the mail sack containing three precious packages sinking to earth somewhere in the void of darkness behind him.
CHAPTER IV
A MOMENTOUS DECISION
In choosing to land in the dark on an unknown field, Curlie Carson realized that he was taking a terrible chance. Night landings are always a problem. The appearance of the ground is deceiving. A narrow run, deep and dangerous, may be hidden by its banks; a sudden swell may bring disaster.