Alias-the-Blackbird-Chapter-07

CEDAR spun the propeller of the HS boat, with a sharp snap, and a quick jump away, as Hammer directed him. The loud engine yelled, the propeller blast tore up the surface of the lake. Cedar scrambled to shore and pushed the boat off, swinging it bow outward by one wing. Over the furrowing water it fled into the wind, while Cedar stood watching it a little while, saturated by the driven water of the propeller’s wake.

He turned and left the shore, as he saw the boat leap off. He climbed up the slope to his cabin. The HS was turning round the woody shore, circling to gain altitude out of the valley. Cedar cranked his telephone, calling Amsel at Iron Mine.

“Sergeant speaking,” he said. “I wanted to warn you again to stay away from them old mine shafts, Amsel.”

Amsel made a formless sound.

“I didn’t get that,” said Cedar kindly. “Connection must be bad. What say?”

“Have you been snooping around here?” asked Amsel in a voice not much louder than a whisper. “What have you found?”

“I happened to think of it, ’cause I nearly got myself drowned in an old shaft up on the Ridge today,” replied Cedar calmly.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Amsel in a louder, firmer voice. “I’m no such fool as to allow myself to be caught. I’ll mind my own business, Sergeant, and thank you to mind yours.”

“I suppose it’s only your own fool business if you want to be buried alive,” said Cedar, somewhat nettled. “Go ahead and make a meal of yourself for rattlesnakes and hoptods, in a hole deep underground. Lucky you’re far enough away so I won’t hear you hollering. It will be an awful thing, and I’m kind of squeamish, Amsel.”

“Thanks, Sergeant,” said Amsel grudgingly.

“I just had a visitor,” said Cedar more cheerfully. “Captain Hammer came flying up in a boat by hisself. He’s started over your way now.”

“What!” screamed Amsel.

“Hammer,” explained Cedar patiently. “He thinks he can spot this blackbird plane from the air, wherever it’s been hiding. You keep an eye on him and report to me. Be sure to keep me posted. Hey, Amsel, are you listening? Oh, Amsel!”

Cedar rang again. Something must have happened to the wire, for it was dead.

Cedar moved out to his porch, watching the sun go down. The HS was still circling, in widening sweeps, around the sides of the valley, mounting toward the pale sky above. Shadows lay upon the heavy woods which covered the slopes, and the smooth waters of Bitter Lake had taken on a look of blackness.

As the HS came over, in its last wide sweep, already four hundred feet above the cabin, Cedar cupped his hands and shouted up, unaware that above the engine roar all sounds were inaudible to Hammer.

“Come back and tell me what you find!” he bawled.

The HS leveled and drove westward toward the Ridge, toward the red heart of the sun. Hammer waved his hand overside and was gone. It was a salute and a farewell.

Over the humpbacked Ridge the singing boat fled, like a wild goose on migration. And there, three miles away, Cedar Rudd thought he beheld another speck moving through the crimson air. The sun dazzled his eyes. He shook his head and blinked. Left wing down and right wing high, it came from the west—a speck, and nothing more.

Quickly Cedar stepped back into the cabin and pulled down his rifle from the wall. He had been laying for that hawk.

STEADILY Hammer circled out of the valley, till he was above the Bitter Lake watershed and could see other, smaller spots of water glinting among the autumn woods. With enough altitude he might be fairly sure of finding himself all the time within gliding distance of a lake.

The terrain was new to him. Two days before, he had been caught in the bow hold of the Gold Beetle, as tight and quite as blind as a snail in a duck’s gullet. He knew the Beetle had crashed somewhere west of Bitter Lake. He intended to locate the precise spot, by the fire-blackened ground and the police cabin to which Cedar had carried him. From this point he would search in widening circles, till he had uncovered the Blackbird’s lair.

There must be a lair; the Blackbird had come down. Though respecting Cedar Rudd’s woods sense, Hammer knew the Blackbird had landed somewhere. Possibly this was a spot so well known to Cedar that he had not thought of it. The obvious is always most difficult to observe, even for a keen-eyed woodsman.

In the twenty or thirty minutes following the Beetle’s crash the Blackbird had landed, had visited the wreck more than once, carrying from it ten solid boxes, weighing twenty-five pounds each, and had finally returned to fire the wreck. His black plane, then, had been near. It was probable, from the dexterity and dispatch of the whole business, that the Blackbird had timed his attack precisely, had caused the Beetle to crash in a previously selected spot, where he might follow it and pick its bones. So Hammer reasoned.

He swung his heavy boat around, shooting straight for the low sun across the Ridge’s saddle. Crisp wind burned his face. The engine was tuned to a beautiful, clear song. The body of the air was thick and smooth as honey. The mountains moved. He himself seemed to stand still in space above a creeping world.

As he dropped Bitter Lake astern and the hump of the mountain rose below, he searched the farther slope for a lake. He could not venture too far from water. Should the HS crash on land in the deep forest, her fate would be even worse than the Beetle’s. His eyes settled on a little black spot of water ahead, beyond the Ridge, nestled deep in a somber hemlock forest, at the bottom of a cup of hills. It seemed not much bigger than a millpond, yet he was satisfied.

This kind of flying was more perilous than he would have admitted to Cedar, more perilous than he’d admit to himself. The HS was not a dexterous boat, and her natural clumsiness was complicated by his injured leg. He could swing her right without difficulty, but could negotiate a left turn only by pulling in the rudder bar with the point of his shoe—a ticklish business.

If the Blackbird should come on him unawares, in that swift, twisting, somersaulting little blackbird ship— Well, Hammer didn’t like to think of what would happen.

“When I see you coming, Blackbird, you’ll see me going,” Hammer thought grimly. “But I’ll be back. Blackbird, on something like even terms. Then we’ll finish a certain argument, you and I.”

Blackbird, Blackbird. Where was he hiding in those deep forested hills? Where was he flitting, what was he hunting? Blackbird! Hammer had crossed the Ridge.

He leaned overside, looking down. The direct horizon sun had momentarily dazzled his eyes.

The forest summit was two hundred feet below. He could make out the trail, brown and narrow, crossing over the saddle. Crests of trees stirred crimson and copper and yellow, a restless ocean of painted waves tossing in the wind. And lifting swiftly from below, swooping up like a dismal shadow or like a bat from Tartarus, its narrow wings climbing fast and bullet nose up-pointed, there came the black ship with the blackbird in it, like a man in a coffin!

Hammer gasped a word that was a prayer, and set his teeth, for he knew that his hour was on him.