Bell put his mind to the unsettling thought that of three acts of sabotage, only one could be connected to Harry Frost. Three acts of sabotage since the racers gathered at Belmont Park. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin twice a victim, Platov and poor Judd the mechanician the third.

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s first smash had been so clearly a distraction engineered by Harry Frost to kill Josephine.

But how could he blame the second attack on Eddison-Sydney-Martin on Harry Frost? What would Frost get out of Eddison-Sydney-Martin smashing? Just as he had wondered back at Belmont, what would Harry Frost get out of Dmitri Platov’s engine jumping the track and killing a mechanician? Was Frost attacking the entire race instead of concentrating on killing his wife? That didn’t make sense at this stage. Frost was too single-minded to spread himself thin. He would concentrate on killing his wife first, a crime which, if successful, would have the collateral effect of besmirching Preston Whiteway’s race as well.

But to what purpose had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? And to what purpose had the headless pusher been made to smash?

To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the likeliest answer.

Who would gain? Three possibilities hovered in Bell’s mind, two likely, one odd but not entirely unlikely. The saboteur could be a competitor—one of the birdmen—eliminating his strongest rivals. Or the saboteur could be a gambler trying to throw the race by getting rid of front-runners. Or, oddly, it could be the race sponsor himself trying to generate publicity.

The likeliest was a competitor trying to gain an edge by eliminating his strongest rivals. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge prize, more money than a workingman would earn in a lifetime.

But the money wagered as the race progressed across the country would be even more than could be made by fixing a horse race. High rollers like Johnny Musto could rake it in.

Preston Whiteway presented a third, strange possibility. Bell could not forget that the publisher had stated unabashedly that the best thing that could happen to keep people excited about the race would be half the male contestants smashing to the ground before Chicago. “A natural winnowing of the field,” as he had put it coldly, “will turn it into a contest that pits only the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.”

Too far-fetched? But was Preston Whiteway above engineering aeroplane smashes to sell newspapers? Truth, facts, and moral decency hadn’t stopped him from trying to start a war with Japan over the Great White Fleet. Nor had they restrained him from using the sinking of the battleship Maine to incite the Spanish-American War.

JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FELL farther behind on the one-hundred-forty-five-mile leg from Albany to Syracuse when the hastily repaired alettone seized up, and its entire mounting had to be replaced. Then she lost half a day between Syracuse and Buffalo when the Antoinette blew a cylinder.