“So little!” The man stared with unbelieving eyes.
“There is much more. This is all that matters now. This is urgent. It’s a registered sack. Perhaps a matter of life and death.”
Even as Curlie spoke he caught the sound of voices. They came from the direction of the plane. His pursuers were approaching the farmhouse, having discovered that the registered mail was gone. Would he yet be caught?
“Come!” he exclaimed. “We must go!”
The farmer, too, had heard the shouts. He appeared bewildered, undecided.
Without wasting another word, the boy whipped out his flashlight, set it circling the barnyard, then dashed to a shed where the truck was kept. The next instant the motor was purring.
Before the farmer had collected his wits sufficiently to move, Curlie had driven the truck into the center of the yard.
“Perhaps he thinks I am a mail robber, those others the pilots,” he told himself. “What can a farmer know about such things? If worse comes to worst, I’ll drive away alone and take the consequences.”
This proved unnecessary. Awakened from his sleep to find himself confronted by an emergency, the slow-going, methodical farmer had found his mind unequal to the situation. When his own truck came rumbling up to his doorstep he climbed in; then, at the boy airman’s request, he pointed the way to the small city nearest his home.
For a time at least after that, fortune favored Curlie. The road to town, he found, led by the airport. Half an hour had not elapsed before the shuddering farm truck drew up at the airport’s entrance.