The Race (Isaac Bell 4)

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ISAAC BELL SAID, “Eustace, I’ve been watching you and you don’t look happy. Are you homesick?”

They were getting the machine ready to take off from Topeka, Kansas. The Chicago kid he had hired to help Andy Moser was pouring gasoline through layers of cheesecloth to strain out any water that may have contaminated the supply. It was a daily ritual performed before mixing in the castor oil that lubricated the Gnome engine.

“No, sir, Mr. Bell,” Weed answered hastily. But judging by the expression knitting his brow and pursing his lips, Bell thought something was very much wrong.

“Miss your girl?”

“Yes, sir,” he blurted. “I sure do. But. . You know.”

“I do know,” Bell said sincerely. “I’m often away from my fiancée. I’m lucky on this case, as she’s around filming the race for Mr. Whiteway, so I get to see her now and then. What’s your girl’s name?”

“Daisy.”

“Pretty name. What’s her last name?”

“Ramsey.”

“Daisy Ramsey. There’s a mouthful. . But wait. If you marry, she’ll be Daisy Weed.” Bell said it with a grin that coaxed a wan smile out of the boy.

“Oh, yes. We kid about that.” The smile faded.

Bell said, “If something is troubling you, son, is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, thank you, sir, I’m O.K.”

Eddie Edwards, the white-haired head of the Kansas City office, approached Bell, muttering, “We got trouble.”

Bell hurried to the hangar car with him.

Andy Moser, who had been working nearby, tightening the Eagle’s wing-stay turnbuckles, said, “You sure you’re O.K., Eustace? Mr. Bell seems concerned about you.”

“His eyes go through you like iced lightning.”

“He’s just looking out for you.”

Eustace Weed prayed that Andy was right. Because what Isaac Bell had spotted on his face was his sudden horrified realization of what they would force him to do with the copper tube of water sealed with paraffin wax.

He had been hoping that the criminals threatening Daisy had changed their minds. No one approached him in Peoria or Columbia, or Hannibal, Missouri, to tell him what to do with it. After Hannibal, where the race crossed the Mississippi River, he assumed it would happen in Kansas City. It was the only real city on the map since Chicago, and he had developed a picture in his mind of big-city saloonkeepers knowing one another but disdaining their counterparts in small towns. So he had dreaded Kansas City.

But no one had approached him there, either, nor when the race pulled up on the far side of the Missouri River. There had even been a letter from Daisy waiting for him, and she sounded fine. This very morning, camped by the Kansas River outside Topeka, preparing Mr. Bell’s machine to head south and west over the empty plains toward Wichita, the terrified mechanician had begun to wonder, would the whole nightmare simply go away? Trouble was, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And just now, while Mr. Bell watched him strain the gas before mixing the fuel, Eustace Weed suddenly knew that Harry Frost’s man would order him to drop the tube in Isaac Bell’s flying-machine fuel tank.

He had figured out how that little copper tube would make Bell’s flying machine smash. It was as ingenious as it was horrific. The Eagle’s Gnome rotary engine was fuel lubricated. It had no oil reservoir, no crankcase, no pump to maintain oil pressure – in fact, no oil at all. The castor oil suspended in the gasoline did the job of oil, greasing the passage of the piston through each of the cylinders. It mixed in readily because castor oil dissolved in gasoline.

Like paraffin. The paraffin wax that plugged the copper tube would also dissolve in gasoline. When the gas melted the plugs, in an hour or so, the water would leak out and contaminate the fuel. Two tablespoons of water in a flying-machine gas tank was more than enough to stop Isaac Bell’s engine dead. Were he flying high at the time, he might manage to volplane down safely. But if he was taking off, or attempting to alight, or making a tight turn low to the ground, he would smash.

ISAAC BELL LISTENED WITH DEEP CONCERN, but not much surprise, as Eddie Edwards reported grim news he had just learned from a contact in the United States Army. Someone had executed a daring raid on the arsenal at Fort Riley, Kansas.

“The Army’s hushed it up,” Eddie explained, “criminals busting into their arsenal not being the sort of event they want to read in the newspaper.”

“What did they get?”

“Two air-cooled, belt-fed Colt-Browning M1895 machine guns.”

“Had to be Frost,” said Bell, picturing in his mind the four-hundred-and-fifty-rounds-per-minute weapons enveloping Josephine’s monoplane in blizzards of flying lead.

“You gotta hand it to him, that man’s got nerve. Right under the nose of the U.S. Army.”