Alias-the-Blackbird-Chapter-02

SERGEANT CEDAR RUDD, who had charge of a fifty-square-mile section of forest and mountain in the Ramapo hills, inland from Stony Point-on-the-Hudson—riding fire patrol over it spring and fall, gunning for timber thieves and fur thieves in the winter, acting as nursemaid for hordes of city campers in the summer—was a witness to the piracy of the great Gold Beetle and the butchery of her pilot in the air.

Cedar Rudd didn’t see it all completely, true, for clouds were rolling low overhead; a cobweb nimbus was drifting from the north, not more than five hundred feet above his cabin on Bitter Lake. At times the two planes were hidden by the cloud, like dragons howling and fighting above the world’s roof. Except for Cedar Rudd, no man saw it, for the woods were deserted of casual campers in October; and the Ramapo hills, which can be very lively in July—thronged with motor campers and Boy Scouts; with bookkeepers from the city, wandering around flatfooted, in olive drab shirts and tennis sneakers, pretending to themselves that they are Daniel Boone or Pusquatasossamminie the Iroquois scalper; with ladies in knickerbockers and silk stockings hopping gaily over the untenanted trails on the hunt for mountain laurel, and squealing louder than pigs when they happen to find a lazy, yellow timber rattler sunning itself on the rocks—the Ramapo hills can be as desolate as the virgin north woods in the season when the katydids are crying and the sumac turns to red.

Sergeant Cedar Rudd was swimming in Bitter Lake, when first he heard the Beetle droning on its course from the east. He floated on his back, allowing the yellow sunlight to soak into him, as he observed the passage of clouds. The brown waters of the lake were filled with particles of fine moss and other vegetation; the lake’s bottom was “turning over,” as Cedar would have explained it; and the thick fluid look of the water gave a peculiar feeling of warmth and solidity. Cedar dozed on the water’s breast, keeping one ear open for the braying of his mule, Snowball, stabled across the lake, and allowing his stomach to luxuriate in the thought of a beefsteak dinner that Officer Amsel, in charge of the Iron Mine District to the west of Bitter Lake over the Ridge, had promised him for that night.

“Not much of a woodsman, Amsel ain’t,” thought Cedar, “and a kind of a funny duck; but he sure can fry the pants off of a beefsteak.”

His ears were filled with the roaring of the Gold Beetle as it droned through its pathway across the hills, nine hundred feet above him. Clouds passed. When he could see the giant boat again, it was nearly overhead, and the blackbird, appearing out of nowhere, was flying wing and wing with it.

“Pretty,” thought Cedar. “Kinda pretty.”

Above the engine’s noise the blackbird unloosed its sudden rifle yelp. Cedar lifted up his head from the water, listening keenly. About the ways of the air he knew no more than a woodchuck, but he knew the sound of firearms. He had been in war. He handled guns now in his daily business, and was an excellent marksman.

“A movie fake,” he thought. “Doggone, it sounds like the real business!”

In that instant the two ships were overhead. Something splashed down beside Cedar’s head into the water. He rolled over, struck down with his arms and arrowed deep. In the brown glinting water he caught it as it settled and brought it to the surface with him. What he held in his palm was a rifle shell, not a blank, but made to kill. Cedar recognized it without hesitation as one of German manufacture, for he had seen the like of it only recently in Amsel’s cabin—a souvenir of war.

Again the wicked automatic gun opened up its cricket chirrup, crackling through the heavy bellowing of the Beetle. The two ships had passed to the west. Between curling cloud pillows, Cedar caught flashes of them. Nose down, toward the Ridge that rimmed the western sky, the Beetle was plunging with loud clamor, like a giant sister to one of the fat, clumsy, stupid, buzzing insects for which she had been named. And darting on her tail, with deft plunges right and left, the little blackbird clung like a hornet, shooting its sting repeatedly.

“Doggone, you can’t do that and get away with it!” roared Cedar Rudd. “That’s damned murder!”

The Gold Beetle dropped beyond the Ridge. The sound of her bellowing engines could no longer be heard. All was a silence—a silence on the earth and in the sky. Then Cedar heard Snowball braying across the lake and quiet water lapping on the shore. The thought flashed into his mind, without his pausing to take account of it, that the blackbird made no sound as it flew. If it made a sound, it was so thin and fine that it was indistinguishable from any distance.

The black ship zoomed triumphantly as the Beetle dropped. Exultantly, fiercely, it leaped upward, nose pointed to the zenith. It was doing a cannibal dance in honor of its victory. Then it too went down beyond the Ridge.

CEDAR RUDD buried his face and threshed to shore. He hauled on shirt and pants over his dripping body, kicked his feet into shoes, without bothering to lace them, and raced up the steep, rocky slope to his police cabin.

“Ring one-three!” he shouted at his telephone. “One-three! One-three! Ring Amsel at Iron Mine! There’s a flying ship crashed down in the Iron Mine District and it looks like murder!”

He stood in his wet shoes.

“Never mind,” he said, breathing heavily. “Amsel must be on patrol. Give me headquarters.”

He turned, when he had made his report, and plunged out of the cabin door again, and down to the lake shore. With short, wiry snaps of his arms, he pulled himself in a flat-bottomed boat across Bitter Lake, drawing a foamy wake behind him.

Snowball brayed him greeting. Cedar cinched a saddle on the fat, white brute. With a drub-drub of his heels into Snowball’s sleek ribs, he bounced up a narrow rocky trail, heading for Amsel’s cabin, in the Iron Mine District, across the Ridge. Four miles of it he covered, trotting up the slopes and clawing down the steeps, over a mountain hump that nearly touched the low cloud. Snowball’s hoofs struck sparks. Cedar Rudd kept a sharp lookout on both sides of the trail. He saw nothing, except the thick forest tangle, crimson and golden; dead leaves dank with autumnal rains, and rotten underfoot; somber boulders, covered with pale green lichens; a chipmunk darting across the trail; a rustle of dead pine needles and ground oak scrub which marked a passing snake.

There came to him from somewhere in the woods the smell of smoke, sharp smoke with a bitter tang. Ordinarily he would have plunged immediately into the thicket, searching it, but now this other business consumed him. He gave a heavy taste of his heels to Snowball, and emerged at a rolling gallop into a narrow, grass-carpeted glade, beside the Iron Mine police cabin.

“Amsel!” he shouted. “Amsel! Where are you? There’s been murder done around here!”

He swung himself from the white mule’s back and strode into the cabin. The telephone was ringing the Iron Mine call—a long ring, three short—ting-ta-ta-ta! Ting-ta-ta-ta! Cedar Rudd snapped down the receiver. It was headquarters calling.

“Yea,” he answered, “Iron Mine; Cedar speaking. I just come over the Ridge. Both planes must have dropped down somewhere, and I ain’t seen any fly away . . . You’re throwing a line around the district? . . . Good! . . . Better send up a surgeon, too, I reckon. We’ll need him. I’m going to get hold of Amsel now and beat through the woods.”

He went outside and spotted someone moving at the far end of the glade, where the grassy level terminated in a steep cliff, tangled with undergrowth and topped with hemlock woods. Cedar strode forward with a swift stride, swinging from the hips. The man was Amsel, black-eyed, alert, cautious in his movements, the patrol officer of Iron Mine.

“Hey, Amsel, what you been doing—mining iron ore on Government property?” asked Cedar.

His quick glance had noted wheel tracks on the grass, and there was a wheelbarrow upended against the cabin wall to explain them. An old mine shaft had its entrance somewhere in that tangled cliff. It was one of a multitude that dotted the hills.

“You’re green to the woods, sonny,” he told Amsel bluntly. “Don’t go fooling around them old shafts. They ain’t been used for a hundred and fifty years, and their timbers is rotted away. Most of ’em is filled with seepage. More than one kid’s been caught in them and ain’t never been heard of again.”

Officer Amsel crept forward slowly. He was a small man, with bright black eyes peering alertly out of a sharp face. His face was very white.

“Them shafts is nothing better than bottomless sinks,” said Cedar kindly. “I’d hate to have you drowned in one.”

“What has brought you here, Sergeant?” muttered Amsel.

“There’s been an airplane crash somewhere around this section,” said Cedar. “They passed over Bitter Lake half an hour ago—a big one, and a little black fellow shooting the living daylights out of th’ other. They dropped down somewhere on your side of the Ridge. I think we’ll find some dead men when we find ’em.”

He turned and swung into step with Amsel. They walked back toward the slab-boarded cabin.

“Airplanes around here?” asked Amsel with an incredulous laugh. “Where would they find a landing place in the woods? You’ve been dreaming, Sergeant. I’ve been near the cabin all day, and I haven’t seen or heard anything.”

“It’s not up to you and me, my boy, to argue what sort of landing fields airplanes do or don’t need, or anything about ’em,” retorted Cedar Rudd with dignity. “Leave such things to the idiots that fly ’em. If you’d been on the job and ’tending to business as you ought to’ve been, you couldn’t help hearing the hollering and commotion of them planes. Doggone! The big fellow come roaring overhead like Niagara Falls itself, and the little blackbird was doing more shooting than has been heard in these hills in a year.”

Amsel stopped, struck by a thought. He shook back the straight black hair, that had a way of tumbling before his eyes, and quirked a bright glance at Cedar Rudd.

“Blackbird?” he repeated. “How do you know?”

“I called it a blackbird because it looked like one,” explained Cedar Rudd. “I am not setting myself up as an authority on airplanes and such. I do say it looked like a blackbird.”

“Of course I heard shooting,” said Amsel slowly. “Who could help hearing? But I didn’t bother about it. I thought it was you, Sergeant, amusing yourself with a little target practice.”
“The sound was nearer to you than
that, Amsel,” said Cedar grimly. “If you want to get along in the woods, you got to know where sounds come from, and
how, and what they mean, as well as learning to read immediately all other signs of the forest. Them two planes came down on your side of the Ridge. They weren’t a mile away from your front door. The big fellow have tore a hole in
the woods, where he hit, and the men in him will be dead or dying, while we stand here gassing about it. We got to find him, Amsel, for there’s murder in it.” In the wilderness tangle to the left.
Cedar Rudd heard a sudden shot. He heeled, tense as a wolf, his green eyes narrowed.
“Hear that! By God, I said it’s
murder!”
Again a shot. And again, and again, and again. Cedar Rudd plunged toward
it, growling deep in his throat, hand on his holster.