“I guess you’ll have to ask him,” Al grinned, and went over to get his bicycle. Sandy Jim followed him, dragging a small parcel out of his hip pocket.
“As long as you’re riding,” he suggested, “go past the house and slip this in to Jimmy-junior. It’s some odds and ends of broken stuff for him to use on his new model air-liner.”
“Glad to,” Al took the parcel.
“Get back quick as you can,” urged Sandy. “I need a good helper.”
Al quickly sent his bicycle along the highway. Stopping at Sandy’s home he took as little time as he could to drop the parcel, and to explain to Jimmy-junior that the reason he had not yet been taken into the Sky Squad was that they had been too busy, evenings, to hold any meetings.
Then he made his way to the roadhouse near Rocky Lake Park, and leaned his wheel against the veranda supports.
“Is Mister Jones busy?” he asked a sleepy waiter who was listlessly dusting off some chairs in one of the small compartments made to look like the cabin of an air-liner. Al had found it easy to learn the ex-pilot’s name.
“In the office,” the man jerked a thumb toward a side room. Al, knocking at the door and hearing a gruff voice bid him enter, went into the same room Bob had described as the scene of the quarrel between the roadhouse man and Griff.
The man, looking up from some work at a small desk, had a coarse, scowling face. No wonder he was “ex” pilot, Al reflected, with a face as brutish and a manner as unfriendly and curt as “Mr. Jones” showed.
“What’s wanted?”