Bowman had no means of knowing how long he had been unconscious, or how far from San Francisco the plane had traveled. He tried to observe the splotches of sunlight on the floor of the plane for the purpose of determining direction. He had tentatively decided the plane was flying slightly east of north when the motor was throttled down. The plane inclined sharply downward toward a landing.
Bowman, his flying senses functioning automatically, estimated the rate of descent, and decided that the plane had been traveling very high — something over ten thousand feet. As the wheels jolted to a landing, he decided that the pilot was not particularly expert.
Then the jolting of the plane as it taxied toward a hangar sent a series of pains through his aching head which kept him from thinking at all. He lay on the floor of the cabin in agony, and heaved a great sigh of relief as the plane swung in a circle and the motor stopped. The cabin door opened. A man’s voice said, “You shouldn’t have made that report over the telephone, Howard.”
The man who had been piloting the plane said, in a sulky voice, “How the hell was I to let you know? Did you want me to try telepathy?”
It was the voice of the man who had posed as the lawyer.
The first man had no answer to that. He spoke to the girl. “You put it over all right, Lottie.”
“I’ll say I put it over,” she said. And Bowman noticed once more that lilting note of reckless youth in her voice.
Hands grasped his ankles. He was pulled out from the corner of the cabin.
“Get a blindfold,” someone said. And Bowman saw hands with a bandage. But before the bandage shut out his vision, he saw the face of the first speaker — a lean, bony face, with a prominent jaw, high cheek bones and a long, thin nose, with pinched nostrils. The eyes were close-set and alert. Then the bandage shut out Bowman’s vision.
A knife cut the ropes around his ankles. He tried to walk, but his feet were numb. After the first few staggering steps circulation started to return with an agony of sensation as might have been caused had his legs been used as pin cushions.
“Give him a kick, Howard,” the man with the bony face said.
“Aw, give him a break, Harry,” the girl interposed. “He’s a good scout.”
“Good scout, is he?” Harry retorted. “Then what the hell was he doing horning into our game?”
The girl had no answer ready.
“Well,” remarked Howard, he who had posed as the attorney, “he’s just what I wanted Santa Claus to bring me for Christmas. He’s worth so many millions he can’t count ’em. We can make a million-dollar ransom on this—”
“Shut up,” interrupted Harry. “We’re not going to mix into any kidnaping racket. It’s too damn dangerous. We can get away with murder if we don’t try a shake-down. Remember, he’s seen our faces.”
“Anyone can see my face for a million bucks any time,” grumbled the aviator.
“All right, shut up!” Harry ordered. “We’ll talk it over later. This guy’s ears are open, even if his eyes are covered.”
“We could seal up his mouth too — after we got the million,” Howard said.
Bowman was walking with less difficulty now. He felt a hand grasp his elbow, “Going up steps,” Howard’s voice said.
He climbed three steps, crossed a wooden porch. A door slammed shut behind him. He smelled the musty interior of a house, apparently one which had been unoccupied for some time. Then he was pushed into a room. He felt hands fumbling at the knot in the blindfold. Then the bandage was whipped off. A door closed. A bolt shot home.
Bowman’s eyes surveyed a darkened room. Boards were nailed over the windows. Light came from cracks in the boards. The air of the room was stuffy, ventilation being furnished only by wooden shutters in a peaked gable at the far end. There was no ceiling in the room and it was unplastered. Cobwebbed rafters showed dimly. The walls consisted of bare boards, to which clung occasional remnants of what had once been wall paper. The floor was rough. At one time it had been painted, a drab slate color; but the paint had, for the most part, worn through. A table, two chairs, and an iron bed were in the room. The bed had once been enameled white. Now the enamel was chipped and blackened. A sagging spring was covered with a mattress.
A young woman, seated in one of the chairs, stared at Bowman with wide blue eyes from behind businesslike tortoise-shell spectacles. Her face was filled with character, but too bony to be called beautiful. Her chin was prominent, her lips full, yet shapely.
She struggled to her feet Bowman saw that her wrists were tied in front of her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The name,” he said, “is Bowman. And you, I suppose, are Phyllis Proctor?”
She nodded. “You came to rescue me?” she asked.
He smiled bitterly.
“How long have you been here?” he asked, when she had realized the eloquent significance of his smile.
“Two days.”
“Do you,” he asked, “know what their plans are?”
It was a cruel question, but one which it was necessary for him to ask.
She shook her head. “I haven’t any idea. They can’t hold me for ransom because I haven’t anything, and I haven’t any relatives.”
“How did they get you here?”
“I answered an ad in the paper, an ad asking for a young woman with stenographic qualifications which were almost identical with my own. The ad might have been written with me in mind.”
“It probably was,” he told her dryly. “Do you know where you are?”
“No.”
“How were you taken here, by plane or automobile?”
“In an automobile.”
“Do you know where it is — what direction from San Francisco?”
“No. I was blindfolded.”
Jax Bowman turned to stare about the room. He wanted to make his further questions as few as possible, lest his very questions should show her the hopelessness of their situation and the ultimate fate which awaited them.
“They give you any liberty at all?” he asked.
“Once every three or four hours they come in, untie me, let me walk around. They seem to be waiting for something. I don’t know what it is.”
Bowman walked to the windows. They were boarded up on the inside. The boards were held in place with nails hammered into the wood with the neat precision of professional carpentering.
“Have you any idea what it is they’re waiting for?” Phyllis Proctor asked.
Bowman shook his head and said “Pity they wouldn’t loosen up and give us a deck of cards and free our hands. There’s no damage we could do in here. We couldn’t rip those boards off with our bare hands.”
“I was thinking,” she said, “that a person might be able to swing a chair and smash those boards in.”
Bowman nodded moodily, and said, “But I don’t know what good it would do. They’d hear the crash of glass and the splintering boards. The place looks to me to be rather isolated. It’s far enough removed from all neighbors so that the landing and departure of planes doesn’t attract attention. They — seem to have things all their own way.”
He suddenly thought of something, moved over toward her. “You can manipulate your fingers a little bit,” he said. “See if you can feel in my left hip pocket. There’s a jack-knife there — unless they’ve taken it from me.”
She explored his pockets, each in turn, shaking her head moodily after each pocket had been searched.
“I’m afraid they’ve taken everything,” she said. “No, wait a minute, I can hear the ticking of a watch. Here’s your watch. They left that.”
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes past two.”
Bowman frowned thoughtfully. Regardless of what these men had been waiting for originally, he felt certain they were now waiting only for one thing — darkness.