Bell’s eyes roved urgently over the industrial ground. There was no grass field in sight, of course. The rail yard was crisscrossed with freight trains, and the stockyards were thick with steers. He chose the only option. Battling a crosswind and hoping for eighty yards of open space, he tried to bring his aeroplane down on the pier that paralleled the one on which Frost had disembarked. A switch engine obligingly pulled a string of boxcars off it toward the yards. But stevedores scuttled about with wheelbarrows, and a team of horses ventured onto the pier, hauling a freight wagon.

The noisy racket of Bell’s Gnome engine, blatting loudly as he blipped it on and off to slow down, spooked the horses. They stopped dead in their tracks. When they saw the bright yellow monoplane dropping out of the sky, they reared and backed up. The stevedores dove for cover, clearing a path except for the wheelbarrows they abandoned.

The pier was eighty feet wide. The American Eagle’s wings spread forty feet. Bell brought her in right down the middle on a smooth wooden deck between two railroad tracks. His rubber-sprung wheels took the first impact, which forced them up to let the skids act as brakes. But the timbers were smoother than turf, and the Eagle glided like a skier on snow, losing almost no speed until it hit a wheelbarrow. The barrow tangled in the skids and caused the Eagle to tip forward onto her propeller. The nine-foot polished walnut airscrew snapped like a matchstick.

Bell jumped from the aeroplane and hit the ground running, extracting the empty magazine from his pistol and shoving in a fresh one. The ships moored along the pier that Frost had mounted from the scow blocked his view of the fleeing man. Bell was almost to the shore before he glimpsed Harry Frost, already on solid ground, running full tilt toward the stockyards.

Another railroad cop made the mistake of attempting to stop him. Frost knocked him down and jerked a revolver from the yard bull’s waistband. A fourth rail cop shouted at him and pulled a gun. Frost stopped, took careful aim, and shot him down. Now he stood his ground, turning on his heel, slowly, deliberately, daring any man to try to stop him.

Bell was a hundred yards behind, an impossibly long pistol shot, even with his modified No. 2 Browning. Pumping his long legs, he put on a burst of speed. At a distance of seventy-five yards, he aimed for Frost’s head, assuming that the marauder was wearing his bulletproof vest. It was still extreme range. He braced his pistol on a rock-steady forearm, exhaled, and smoothly curled his trigger finger. He was rewarded with a howl of pain.