“I’ll be over in fifteen minutes!” Duff said. “Whatever is happening, this time it looks as if we were going to prove something they’ll believe!”
FOUR
The commercial air lines were sold out to the last seat for the holiday season. Scotty’s father was unable to get reservations. So it was in the plane of Scotty’s friend that they left an ice-coated airfield, shortly before midnight. The plane, as Scotty had promised, was fast. They made one stop for fuel, in Savannah, and swept south over the Everglades at dawn.
A red sky at morning, Duff reflected, wasn’t a “sailor’s warning” in Miami. Just a custom of the country. And he reflected — thinking of whatever came to mind in order to wear away the interminable hours of flight — that it was an advantage to be rich, like the Smythes. To have friends with planes, who’d make an emergency hop from New York to Miami just for fun. To be able to have a convertible you were too rushed to drive put aboard a freight car by the family chauffeur. Money meant things like that. But it didn’t necessarily
“corrupt character,” as Duff’s preacher father firmly believed and as Duff himself had vaguely assumed. There was nothing corrupt about Scotty Smythe’s character.
Duff was dozing when the plane bounced, braked, turned and taxied. Its pilot looked back. “All out!”
Scotty said, “Thanks a million, Al! Go on over to my place—”
“Nope. Gotta get back. Check in here, and out.”
“Wonderful thing of you to do.”
“Rather fly than eat. Well—”