“Well I’ll be ——!” was all that I could think of to say, and Les assured me that I was that already.
“Where’s the sarge now?” was my next question.
“Oh, he got his strength back quick—wounds weren’t as bad as yours—and he’s in the hospital at Langham now.”
“Well, have the sleuths unearthed anything?”
“Plenty, but not all,” big, serious Tolley told me. “One of the men in the Jenny that fought you was alive, but he wouldn’t say a word. They’ve arrested three more, though. Don’t know whether what they’ve said so far is right.”
“Come on—get out of here!” my jovial doctor interrupted at this stage, coming into the room. “Slim’s still weak as a cup of tea. Tell him tomorrow, whatever it is.”
Before I left the hospital Les, who visited me every trip, told me confidentially all that had happened. Hold your breath now, and prepare. I suppose you think that at the very least you’re about to hear that all the countries of the world got together and concentrated their nefarious master-spies in Cleveland and Boundville, bent on the destruction of the American Air Service. Well, they didn’t. There is no international ephillipsoppenheiming about to be indulged in by me.
With that out, you figure big business. It is always proper to blame Wall Street for everything from the earthquake in Japan to the fact that it didn’t rain in the wheat-belt during July. Well, that’s out, too. You might know that anything I was connected with would turn out to be a farce-comedy eventually. I had to lay back in my bed and laugh myself sick again when I heard it. If there’d been any bullets left in my carcass they’d have clinked together like a castenets.
The fact of the matter was that a wealthy, gentle, gray-haired old nut inventor—a man who’d evidently gone crazy trying to get a perpetual motion machine or something like that—was really responsible for the whole thing. He’s safely ensconced in a lunatic asylum now, working on a mechanical flyswatter or something like that. The facts are approximately as follows:
This old fellow was a multimillionaire, and for years had been trying in his senile way to invent things. Finally he’d concentrated on the Air Service, and had been submitting to McCook Field all sorts of things from a motor run by gun powder to an automobile that turned into a ship, wings sprung out, a propeller attached to the front of the motor, and all that. Naturally, all his stuff was infinitely ridiculous. If you don’t believe how many crack-brained inventors there are who submit perpetual motion machines and all that, ask an official of any big company, or the patent office. And McCook Field gets its share.