“Please!” Bill snapped. “I should have told you over the telephone that I recognized your secretary's voice as the voice of the person who called on me last week and said she was Miss Ruth Reynolds.”
Bill jabbed a hand into an upper waistcoat pocket and pulled a folded piece of paper from it. He spread it out under Miss Reynolds' gaze and said, “She left this with me.”
Miss Reynolds stared at it for a moment and reached for a bell lanyard beside the doorway.
“Is that your signature?” Bill asked.
She nodded her head.
“Tell Miss Johnson I wish to see her here at once,” she said to the uniformed maid, who appeared silently.
“Will you please tell me more about it before she comes,” she then said to Bill.
Bill told her the same things he had told Shorty a short time before, running his words together in his haste to finish before Miss Johnson appeared.
But he needn't have hurried. The maid came back in a few minutes to say that Miss Johnson was neither in her office nor in her room.
“It looks, Miss Ruth,” the maid said, “as though she had gone and had taken all her things.”
“That will be all, Patricia,” Miss .Reynolds said. “What in the world,” she said to Bill, “can be the object?”
“That's what I'm going to find out,” Bill said grimly.
“She didn't even know my brother.”
“How long had she been with you?” Bill asked. “Where did you get her? Who recommended her?”
“Just a moment,” Miss Reynolds said. “I'm frightfully bewildered already. Let me think.” She closed her eyes and tried to rub the creases out of her forehead with the tips of her fingers.
“She had only been with me a short time,” she said. “Four weeks, perhaps. I can find out.”
“Never mind now,” Bill said. “How did she happen to get the job?”
“A—a friend sent her to me,” Miss Reynolds said. Her eyes were a little frightened now.
“An old friend?” Bill persisted.
“No,” she said. “I scarcely knew him. I—I met him—I see now I shouldn't have taken her—I met him at one of the fashionable night clubs, at a party. I don't remember much about him except that he was very charming. We were talking about the unemployed, and——”
She started as Shorty grunted, his eyes flashing. Bill glared at him.
“I told him I had been having a frightful time getting a competent secretary, and he said he knew of one he could send to me,” she went on.
“He would have said the same thing if you had wanted a personal maid or a cook,” Shorty broke in.
“But why?” she asked.
“Because your brother cracked up in the Bering Sea last summer,” Shorty said. “He wanted to get Bill, or Red, or all of us up there.”
“I don't follow that,” she said. “He told me this Miss Johnson came of a very fine old family. Her family had lost all their money in the crash and she was working as a social secretary to pay her way. I wanted to help her. She was very capable.”
“If you had wanted a pocket picked she would probably have done that “very well, toe,” Shorty said. “She was a plant.”
“But why?” Miss Reynolds wailed again.
“We don't know that yet,” Bill said. “But we do know that one of my men is in very grave danger. You see, we don't live the same kind of life you do. Now we've got to find the answer to this one.” He handed the signed, blank check to her. “I would advise you to be a little more careful about what you sign.”
Miss Reynolds' face turned a bright crimson.
“If there is anything I can do,” she
began as the maid came back into the room.
“Some one wishes to speak to a Mr. Barnes on the telephone,” she said. “The person says it is very important.”
Miss Reynolds pointed to a telephone that stood on a table. “Use that extension,” she said.
“Hello, Bill,” Tony Lamport's excited voice said in Bill's ear.
“Yes, Tony. What is it?”
“It's Red, Bill,” Tony said. “He just made contact with me. There was something very peculiar about it. He talked as though he was under wraps —as though some one was telling him what to say. He said he was down off the Alaska Peninsula and had smashed his radio when he crashed. He said he just got it fixed so that he could contact us. He managed to get to a small island and gave me the position of it.”
“What else?” Bill asked tensely.
“That was about all,” Tony said. “His voice kept getting lower and lower and then faded out entirely. I've been standing by constantly trying to pick him up again. But he hasn't come in again.”
“O. K.,” Bill said. “I'll be back there in a little while.”
“Oh, one other thing he said,” Tony said. “I didn't get what he meant. He said something about watching your nozzle injectors on your Diesels when you come after him.”
“Did you write that down?” Bill asked.
“Yes. I took the whole thing down.”
“Tell Scotty to check over the transport, the Eaglet and a Snorter,” Bill ordered. “I'll be back there soon.”
He put the instrument back in its cradle and told Shorty what Tony had told him. Little furrows gathered between Shorty's eyes as he listened. Miss Reynolds watched them both breathlessly.
“He's in a jam,” Shorty said. “Some one was standing over him while he talked—some one with a gun in Ins hand.”
“A gun?” Miss Reynolds said.
“Good-by, Miss Reynolds,” Bill said. “I'm sorry if we've startled you. I'll let you know about this thing later.”
“Please do,” she said. “I'm afraid you'll think I'm awfully stupid.”
“Not awfully—extremely,” Shorty said under his breath.
They were on their way back to the seaplane landing in a taxi when Shorty suddenly slapped Bill hard on the knee.
“I've got it!” he said. “Nozzle injectors! Red was warning us that he was in trouble.”
“I don't get it,” Bill said.
“Remember the code word we arranged when I went out to the Philippines on my own? Remember, we took the name of the largest island, Luzon, and changed it around, spelled it backward? N-0-Z-U-L. Then we called it 'nozzle.' That was to be the code word I would send you it I got in a jam. And you came when I sent it.”
“I remember now,” Bill said grimly. “That's the explanation all right. Smart boy, that Red.”
“Too smart to leave there,” Shorty said.
“Leave there!” Bill roared. “Fellah, we're shoving for Alaska as soon as Scotty is through checking over our ships'.”
IV—OFF FOR ALASKA
BEVERLY BATES, the brown-eyed Bostonian, who was the fifth member of Bill's little squadron, was waiting on the apron with Scotty MacCloskey when Bill and Shorty killed the engines in the Lancer.
“What about Red?” Bev asked as Bill slid out of the Lancer.
Bill saw the same expression of desperate concern in Bev's eyes that he had seen in Shorty's when he told him about Red. He knew the thoughts that were in the back of both their minds. He knew they were thinking about the two tragedies that had broken the long period of good fortune which had attended Bill and his squadron since its conception. They were thinking about Mort Henderson and Cy Hawkins— wondering it Red Gleason was to be next.
What, Bill asked himself before he answered Bev, is behind this thing? Is it some one who is trying to even an old score with Red, or are they striking at me? He shook his head angrily and answered Bev.
“Come into my office,” he said. Then he turned to Scotty MacCloskey.
