“What is it?” asked Helen.
Curt shook his head. “Can’t tell yet and there’s no use in guessing.”
He mopped his forehead with a large bandana and scanned the heavens. The sun was blazing down and shortly the temperature in the little bowl they were in would be stifling.
“We’d better get out of here,” he said.
“But Janet? Where can she be? We’ve followed the trail but it’s simply vanished.” The questions tumbled from Helen’s lips.
“I wish I could answer them all,” said Curt. “Maybe I can later.”
They rode back to the ghost town at a brisk trot and Curt cornered Henry Thorne and told him of their discovery. Then he led a searching party of half a dozen into the hills back of the town while the other members of the company assembled for the day’s work under the boiling sun.
Helen attempted to join the searching party, but was told it was no place for a girl so she went with the company out into the desert where the airport had been laid out and a dummy hangar erected.
Shooting went ahead on schedule until just before noon when someone shouted an alarm and they turned toward the ghost town. The remaining houses were rapidly being consumed by flames and before they could reach them there was no hope of saving anything, including a number of valuable cameras, sound equipment and hundreds of dollars worth of costumes.
Henry Thorne fairly blazed for he knew now that a deliberate effort was being made to stop the production of “Kings of the Air.”