There was a finality about her words that carried conviction. That was Joan all over. She was very quiet, very self-possessed, very polite, but she was like the Rock of Gibraltar when she made up her mind.
Epworth did not reply. Now that he was actually following the Greyhound he did not want to desert his task. He pushed nearer to the three red lights. Billy was purposely running with his cut-outs open, and he could hear the roar of the Greyhound’s engines. This was another evidence that he was trailing the right airplane. At this time all other planes that sailed the air were as silent as birds.
“Now let me hear how you got on to this job?”
“You talk too much,” Joan rebuked severely. “I heard you talking to Billy last night when he came up to the house.”
“Then if you know about it I guess the bandits know something about it also,” he chuckled.
Joan did not answer, and for an hour Epworth ran to the starboard of the Greyhound, and several hundred feet higher.
“There is a shadow hanging over the Greyhound,” Joan observed presently. “Is it a cloud?”
“So soon!” Epworth exclaimed in astonishment. “Those robbers are certainly wise ones, and the leak out of the Atlantic-Pacific Airlines must be as big as a river.”
“I do not seem to get you,” Joan replied slangily. She had been associating so much with aviators and air men that she had become one. “Spring a little larger leak in your gas line.”
“You are now going to view the methods of the sky bandits,” he said slowly, handing her his binoculars. “Keep your eyes fixed on that shadow, and I will manipulate the plane nearer so that you will be certain.”