Jane looked at her elderly companion. Mrs. Van Verity Vanness had her eyes closed tightly and Jane spoke to her reassuringly.
“It’s a long ride to Chicago,” she said. “Suppose we look through some magazines. Then we’ll have a cup of bouillon and sandwiches just before midnight and after that I’ll tuck you in for the night.”
“Tuck me in for the night?” asked Mrs. Van Verity Vanness. “Why, I’ll never be able to sleep.”
“I think you will. You can unfasten your safety belt now and I’ll see what I can find in the way of magazines.”
Jane returned a minute later with half a dozen copies of the latest magazines. She adjusted the reading light for her companion and Mrs. Van Verity Vanness, seeing Jane so calm and casual, forced herself to overcome the fear of flying which had sickened her. She selected a magazine from the armful Jane offered and settled herself comfortably in her seat.
“I’m really commencing to enjoy it,” she smiled, “but there’s a bit of a draft around my feet.”
Jane hurried back to the compartment where a supply of warm, woolly blankets were kept. Selecting a pretty grey and pink one she wrapped it around the elderly woman’s legs. With Mrs. Van Verity Vanness comfortable and apparently satisfied for some time, Jane opened the Cheyenne paper.
She halfway expected to find a front page story on the dash across country of Mrs. Van Verity Vanness in a special plane for almost any activity of this multi-millionaire widow was worth a half column of space. Instead, Jane read the alarming news that a mail plane had been robbed early that morning by aerial bandits. The ship, a Bertold single engined plane, had been shot down in southeastern Iowa on the Kansas City to Chicago run and more than a hundred thousand in currency taken from the registered mail pouch which it carried. The pilot had been seriously wounded by the two bandits, who had used a machine gun to force the mail ship down.
Jane resolved right then and there to keep all of the papers away from Mrs. Van Verity Vanness. If aerial bandits were operating, it was entirely within the realm of possibility for them to attack a special chartered by a woman as wealthy as her companion.
The tri-motor hurled through the night, the speed increasing as Charlie Fischer pushed it up another thousand feet to benefit by an even stronger tail wind at that altitude. They roared along at between 165 and 170 miles an hour, nearly 50 miles above the usual cruising speed of a plane of that type.