Les listened, demurred a bit, argued, and finally we came to a decision. He finally agreed whole-heartedly with me on all points. The combination of circumstances was such as to make merely a cluster of coincidences seem very unlikely. Marston’s past, and his present attitude; the fires at the Martin factory; the filed wires; and above all, the convenient sickness which made it impossible for him to go up in the crippled ships, all pointed one way.
Les stayed at Boundville to summon a wrecking crew from Dayton, salvage my ship, and likewise to watch Marston. I wired Washington and immediately hopped a train for that thriving village. I was met at the depot by a pop-eyed trio of high-ranking Air Service officials, was rushed to headquarters without an opportunity to scrub off the cinders, and in less than two minutes I was telling my wild and wooly yarn to the chief himself and six puzzled, scared and completely flabbergasted aides, assistants and adjutants. Having finished the story, I talked about Marston, not even deleting the fight. Following on, I submitted my scheme to them.
To make a long story short, at the end of three hours Chief Mallory got up from his chair, and paced up and down the floor silently for about a minute. He knows more about the Air Service, I sometimes think, than all the rest of the men in it put together. The bombing maneuvers were his brainchild, and he would be made, or broken, before the world by them.
He’d fought everything and everybody for three years, trying to get a chance for his young hellions to show what they could do, and he was pretty close to a temporary madman as he took in the full possibilities of what I had told him. Finally he whirled on me and said quickly—
“If we accept your procedure, Evans, you know what danger you’ll be in?”
“Forwarned is forearmed, General,” I told him. “I hate to run any chance of doing an injustice to Marston, and I’m leaning over backward so far that if I stubbed my toe I’d fall on my neck, simply because I don’t want my personal prejudice against him to result in any possible injustice.”
“I see,” commented Mallory. “Gentlemen, we will proceed as Lieutenant Evans has suggested.”
So I went back to Boundville, and with me came Colonel Feldmore, a spare, thin-faced, hard-boiled, genial and square old colonel who was in the Army before the Spanish-American war. Likewise, there sifted into town and out to Cleveland, various Secret Service men whose identity was known to nobody. Feldmore conducted an open investigation, and the Secret Service men started checking up on the two strange mountaineers, of whom Marston could give but a very vague description.
Feldmore took a half hour to give a tongue-lashing to Marston because he hadn’t awakened, at least, when the vandals were about. But the careful impression built up by every one was that Marston was not suspected in the least of having had anything to do with filing the wires. He was exonerated. Of course, strictly speaking, he could have been punished for laxity while on guard.