The Race - Страница 2

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A gust of wind snuck up behind and snatched the air that held her wings.

The biplane dropped like an anvil.

Josephine’s exuberant grin leaped ear to ear.

She dipped her elevator. The machine pitched downward, which made it go faster, and Josephine felt the air lift her back onto an even keel.

“Good girl, Elsie!”

Flying machines stayed up by pushing air down. She had figured that out the first time she left the ground. Air was strong. Speed made it stronger. And the better the machine, the more it wanted to fly. This “Elsie” was her third, but definitely not her last.

People called her brave for flying, but she didn’t think of herself that way. She just felt completely at home in the air, more at home than on the ground where things didn’t always work out the way she hoped. Up here, she always knew what to do. Even better, she knew what would happen when she did it.

Her eyes were everywhere: glinting ahead at the blue mountains on the horizon, glancing up repeatedly at the aneroid barometer that she had hung from the upper wing to tell her her altitude, down at the motor’s oil pressure gauge between her legs, and searching the ground for breaks in the forest big enough to alight on if her motor suddenly quit. She had sewn a ladies’ pendant watch to her sleeve to time how much gasoline she had left. The map case, and compass ordinarily strapped to her knee, were back at the house. Born in these mountains, she steered by lakes, railroad tracks, and the North River.

She saw its dark gorge ahead, so deep and sheer that it looked like an angry giant had split the mountain with an ax. The river gleamed at the bottom. A break in the trees beside the gorge revealed a golden meadow, the first sizable opening she had seen since she had taken to the air.

She spied a tiny splash of red, like a flicker’s red crest.

It was a hunting hat worn by Marco Celere, the Italian inventor who built her flying machines. Marco was perched on the cliff, rifle slung over his back, scanning for bear through field glasses. Across the meadow, at the edge of the trees, she saw the hulking silhouette of her husband.

Harry Frost raised his rifle and aimed it at Marco.

Josephine heard the shot, louder than the motor and drive chains clattering behind her.

HARRY FROST HAD A WEIRD FEELING he had missed the Italian.

He was a seasoned big-game hunter. Since retiring rich, he had shot elk and bighorn sheep in Montana, lion in South Africa, and elephants in Rhodesia, and he could have sworn the bullet had gone high. But there was his wife’s swarthy boyfriend squirming on the edge of the cliff, hit but not dead.

Frost levered a fresh.45-70 shell into his Marlin 1895 and found him in the scope. He hated the sight of Marco Celere – oily black hair brilliantined slick to his skull, high forehead like a vaudeville Julius Caesar, thick eyebrows, deep-set dark eyes, waxed mustache curled at the tips like pigs’ tails – and he was taking great pleasure in smoothly squeezing the trigger when suddenly a strange noise clattered in his head. It sounded like the threshing machine at the farm at the Matawan Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where his enemies had locked him up for shooting his chauffeur at the country club.

The bughouse had been worse than the most monstrous orphanage in his memory. Powerful politicians and high-priced lawyers claimed credit for springing him. But it was only right to let him out. The chauffeur had been romancing his first wife.

Unbelievably, it was happening again with his new bride. He could see it written on their faces every time Josephine hit him up for more dough to pay for Marco’s inventions. Now she was begging him to buy the Italian’s latest flying machine back from his creditors so she could win the Atlantic – Pacific Cross-Country Air Race and claim the fifty-thousand-dollar Whiteway Cup.

Wouldn’t that be swell? Winning the biggest air race in the world would make his aviatrix wife and her inventor boyfriend famous. Preston Whiteway – the snoot-in-the-air, born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth San Francisco newspaper publisher who was sponsoring the race – would make them stars, and sell fifty million newspapers in the process. The chump husband would be famous, too – a famously cuckolded, fat old rich husband – the laughingstock of all who despised him.

Rich he was, one of the richest men in America, every damned dollar earned himself. But Harry Frost wasn’t old yet. A little over forty wasn’t that old. And anyone who said he was more fat than muscle hadn’t seen him kill a horse with a single punch – a trick he had performed famously in his youth and lately had made a birthday ritual.

Unlike the treachery with the chauffeur, this time they wouldn’t catch him. No more flying off the handle. He had planned this one down to the last detail. Savoring revenge, going about it like a business, he had resurrected his formidable talents for management and deception to lure the unsuspecting Celere on a bear hunt. Bears couldn’t talk. There’d be no witnesses deep in the North Country woods.

Convinced he had shot higher than he meant to, Frost aimed low and fired again.

– -

JOSEPHINE SAW CELERE whiplashed from the cliff by the force of the bullet.

“Marco!”

THE CLATTER IN HARRY FROST’S SKULL GREW LOUD. Still peering down the barrel of his rifle at the wonderful empty space where Marco Celere had been, he suddenly realized that the noise was not a memory of the Matawan farm but real as the 405-grain lead bullet that had just blown the bride thief into the gorge. He looked up. Josephine was flying over him in her damned biplane. She had seen him shoot her aeroplane inventor.

Frost had three cartridges left in his magazine.

He raised the rifle.

But he didn’t want to kill her. She’d stay with him now that Marco was out of the way. But she saw him kill Marco. They would lock him back in the bughouse. Second time around he’d never get out. That wouldn’t be fair. He wasn’t the betrayer. She was.

Frost whipped the rifle skyward and fired twice.

He misjudged her speed. At least one shot passed behind her. With only a single bullet left, he gathered his wits, settled his nerves, and led the biplane like a pheasant.

Bull’s-eye!

He had scored a hit, for sure. Her flying machine lurched into a wide, clumsy turn. He waited for it to fall. But it kept turning, wobbling back in the direction of the camp. It was too high to hit with a pistol, but Frost jerked one from his belt anyway. Bracing the barrel on his powerful forearm, he fired until it was empty. Eyes bugging with rage, he flicked a snub-nosed derringer out of his sleeve. He emptied its two shots futilely in her direction and pawed at his hunting knife, to cut her heart out when she smashed into the trees.

The clatter grew fainter and fainter and fainter, and Harry Frost could do nothing but watch helplessly as his treacherous wife disappeared beyond the tree line and escaped his righteous wrath.

At least he had blown her lover into the gorge.

He lumbered across the meadow, hoping for a glimpse of Celere’s body smashed on the river rocks. But halfway to the rim of the cliff, he stopped dead, poleaxed by a horrible realization. He had to run before they locked him back in the bughouse.

JOSEPHINE FOUGHT WITH ALL HER SKILL to guide her machine safely to the ground.

Harry had hit it twice. One bullet had nicked the two-gallon gasoline tank behind her. The second was worse. It had jammed the link between her control lever and the wire that twisted the shape of her wings. Unable to warp them to bank the machine into a turn, she was dependent entirely on its rudder. But trying to turn without banking was like flying a glider before the Wright brothers invented wing warping – god-awful awkward and likely to slide her sideways into a deadly flat spin.

Lips tight, she worked the rudder like a surgeon’s scalpel, taking measured slices of the wind. Her mother, a frantic woman unable to cope with the simplest task, used to accuse her of having “ice water in her veins.” But wasn’t ice water handy on a crippled flying machine, Mother? Slowly, she brought the biplane back on course.

When the wind gusted from behind, she smelled gasoline. She looked for the source and saw it dripping from the fuel tank. Harry’s bullet had punctured it.

Which would happen first? she wondered coolly. Would the gasoline all leak out and stop her motor before she could alight on Harry’s lawn? Or would sparks from the engine and chains ignite the gasoline? Fire was deadly on a flying machine. The varnish of nitrate fabric dope that stiffened and sealed the cotton canvas covering her wings was as flammable as flash powder.

The only field nearer was the meadow. But if she alighted there, Harry would kill her. She had no choice. She had to land the machine at the camp, if she had enough gasoline to reach it.

“Come on, Elsie. Take us home.”

The forest inched slowly beneath her. Updrafts buffeted her wings and rolled the airship. Unable to warp them to counteract, she tried to keep the machine on an even keel using her elevators and rudder.

At last she saw the lake beside Harry’s camp.

Just as she got close enough to see the main house and the dairy barns, her motor sputtered on the last fumes of gasoline. The propellers stopped turning. The pusher biplane went silent but for the wind whispering through the wire stays.

She had to volplane – to glide – all the way to the lawn.