Meanwhile, the pilot who had been engaged, very natty in his flying suit, received a puzzling message and wandered off to the empty hangar in which only a week before Ty and Bonnie had been held up. He went into the hangar and looked about.
“Who wants me?” he called.
Echo answered; but answer also materialized, and the man’s jaw dropped as a bulky, shapeless figure in flying togs, wearing a face-concealing pair of goggles and a helmet, stepped from behind a tarpaulined airplane and leveled a revolver at the pilot’s chest.
“Huh?” gasped the pilot, elevating his amis.
The revolver waved an imperious order. The pilot stumbled forward, fascinated. The butt described a short, gentle arc and the pilot crumpled to the floor, no longer interested in the proceedings.
And from a rent in the tarpaulin, behind which he had been suffocating for two hours, Inspector Glücke, automatic in hand, watched the pilot fall, watched the bundled figure stoop over the man and drag him into a corner. The Inspector did not so much as stir a finger; the tap had been gentle, and the interference just then would have been disastrous to the plan.
Because of his position, Glücke could see only the inert body. He did see a pair of hands begin to undress the pilot, divesting him of his outer clothing; it struck Glücke suddenly that the two flying-suits were of different cut; of course, little Egbert would have to put on his victim’s suit and helmet and goggles.
It was all over in two minutes. Glücke saw the flying-suit of the attacker flung down on the unconscious pilot, then the helmet, the goggles; and the quick disappearance of the pilot’s rig.
Then the attacker appeared again, dressed as the pilot, goggled and unrecognizable; he appeared stooping over the motionless figure. He began to bind and gag the pilot. Still the Inspector did not move.
The attacker pushed his bound victim under the very tarpaulin behind which Glücke crouched, pocketed the revolver, and with a certain grim jauntiness strode out of the hangar.
Glücke moved then, quickly. He clambered out of the covered ship, made a low warning sound, and three plainclothes men stepped out of steel lockers. Leaving the unconscious man in their hands, he ducked out of the hangar by a rear door and strolled around the building to merge briefly with the crowd. Then he sauntered casually up to the group of shouting, gesticulating people around the red-and-gold plane.
The “pilot” was busily engaged in picking up the tumbled luggage and depositing it, piece by piece, in the plane. No one paid any attention to him. Finally he climbed into the plane and a moment later the propeller turned over and began to spin with a roar.
He looked out the window and waved his arm impatiently.
The Reverend Dr. Erminius looked startled. But he caught the eye of Inspector Glücke, who nodded, and heaved a relieved sigh.
“All set,” he said in Ty’s ear.
“What?” yelled Ty above the roar of the motor.
Dr. Erminius gave him a significant look. Bonnie caught it, too, and closed her eyes for a second; and then she smiled, and waved, and Ty, looking rather grim, picked her slender figure up in his arms and carried her into the plane to the howling approval of the mob. The Reverend Dr. Erminius followed more sedately. The pilot came out of his cubicle, shut the door securely, went back to his cubicle; the police and field attendants cleared the runway; and finally the signal came, and the red-and-gold plane began slowly to taxi down the field, picking up speed... its tail lifting, its wings gripping the air. And then it left the solid ground and soared into the blue, and they were alone with their destiny.
Afterwards, in recollection, it all seemed to have happened quickly. But at the time there was an interminable interval, during which the thousands on the field below grew smaller and smaller as the plane circled the field, and finally became only animated dots, and the hangars and administration buildings looked like toys, and the runway, the crowd released, suddenly took on the appearance of a gray patch overrun with bees.
Bonnie kept looking out the window as Ty adjusted the speaking tube to her head, and put one on himself, and gave one to Dr. Erminius. Bonnie was trying to look gay, waving idiotically at the mobs below, steadfastly keeping her eyes averted from the cubicle in which the pilot sat quietly at the controls.
Ty’s arm was tightly about her, and his right hand gripped the automatic in his pocket. And his eyes never left the back of the pilot’s helmeted head.
As for the Reverend Dr. Erminius, that worthy beamed on the earth and on the sky, and fumbled with the Word of God, obviously preparing to preside over the coming union of two young, untried souls.
And the plane began imperceptibly to nose towards the northeast, where the desert lay, leveling off at eight thousand feet and throbbing steadily.
“I believe,” announced Dr. Erminius solemnly, and at his words the bees being left behind stopped swarming and froze to the ground as the amplifiers on the field caught his voice, “that the time has come to join you children in the ineffable bliss of matrimony.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said Bonnie in a low voice. “I’m ready.” And she turned around, and gulped, and the gulp was audible as a hollow thunder below. She rose to stand at Ty’s knee and clutch his shoulder. Ty rose quickly then, placing her behind him. His right hand was still in his pocket.
“Oh, pilot,” called Dr. Erminius over the mutter of the motor.
The pilot turned his goggled head in inquiry.
“You have automatic controls there, have you not?”
Ty answered in a flat voice: “Yes, Doctor. This is my plane, you know. The Sperry automatic pilot.”
“Ah. Then if you will come back here, pilot, after locking the controls you may act as the witness to this ceremony. It will be more comfortable than crowding about your cockpit, or whatever it is called.”
The pilot nodded and they saw him adjust something on the complex control-board in front of him. He spent a full minute there, his back to them; and none of them spoke.
Then he got out of his seat, and turned, and stooped, and came into the body of the plane with a swift lurch of his bulky body, looking like a hunchback with the protuberance of the unopened parachute between his shoulder-blades. The Reverend Dr. Erminius had his Book open and ready, and he was beaming on Ty and Bonnie. Ty’s hand was still in his pocket, Bonnie was by his side and yet somehow a little behind him, sheltered by his body and the body of the beaming preacher.
And the preacher said: “Let us begin. Bless my soul, we’re leaving the field! Weren’t we supposed—”
The pilot’s hand darted into his pocket and emerged with a snub-nosed automatic, and he brought his hand up very swiftly, his finger tightening on the trigger as the muzzle came up to aim directly at Bonnie’s heart.
At the same moment there was a flash of fire from Ty’s right pocket, and a flash of fire as if miraculously from the pages of the Good Book in the no longer beaming dominie’s hands; and the pilot coughed and lurched forward, dropping the snub-nosed automatic from a gloved hand which suddenly spouted blood.
Bonnie screamed, once, and fell back; and Ty and Dr. Erminius pounced on the swaying figure.
The pilot lashed out, catching Ty with his good fist on the jaw and sending him staggering back against Bonnie. Dr. Erminius snarled and fell on the cursing man. The two tumbled to the floor of the plane, pummeling each other.
Ty lunged forward again.
But somehow, by exactly what means they never knew, the pilot managed to shake them off. One moment they were all struggling on the floor and the next he was on his feet, goggles and helmet torn away from his flushed face, screaming: “You’ll never hang me!”