Bell listened closely to the heated discussions that followed. The fact Bass would lose two days in the hospital with a brain concussion prompted the birdmen and mechanicians to debate the value of installing belts to keep the drivers from falling off their machines. An Austrian aristocrat flying a Pischof monoplane ridiculed the “cowardly” idea of strapping in with a belt. Many agreed that belting on would be unmanly. But Billy Thomas, the race-car driver who had proven his bravery repeatedly on the raceways before learning how to fly the Vanderbilt syndicate’s big Curtiss Twin Pusher, announced that the Austrian could go to hell, he would wear a belt.

The day he did, a Great Lakes gale blew his Curtiss against a railroad semaphore mast atop a signal tower on a depot building. The Curtiss ricocheted into twenty strands of telegraph wire and bounced back through the second-floor windows of the signal tower.

Billy Thomas’s belt kept him in the wreckage, but he was nearly cut in half by the force of the sudden stop against the rigid leather. Internal organs ruptured, he was out of the race.

Discussion that night at the Cleveland Fairgrounds shifted toward the concept of elastic belts. Mechanicians got busy tinkering with the thick rubber bands already on hand to spring the aeroplanes’ wheels.

The Austrian aristocrat still scoffed. The next day, a gust heeled his Pischof sharply, and he fell off the monoplane a thousand feet over Toledo, Ohio.

At the funeral, Eddison-Sydney-Martin announced that his wife insisted “vehemently” that he be strapped onto his aeroplane, wearing a broad belt fashioned from a horse sling.

Josephine’s and Isaac Bell’s similar craft had them seated deeper within the fuselage, making falling off slightly less likely. Josephine ignored Preston Whiteway’s pleas that she wear a belt. Having survived a smash in a burning biplane, she explained, she was afraid of being trapped.

Isaac Bell, at Marion Morgan’s suggestion, instructed Andy to anchor a wide motorcyclist’s belt to the Eagle with rubber bands. Sheathed next to one of the bands was a razor-sharp hunting knife.

NOTHING WAS HEARD NOR SEEN of Harry Frost since he escaped from Isaac Bell under the Weehawken piers. Bell suspected that Frost was waiting for the race to reach Chicago. Chicago was where he had begun his meteoric rise to the criminal pinnacle from which he had launched his legitimate fortune. In no other city on the continent was Frost better established with gang associates and corrupt politicians. In no other city had he so deeply infiltrated the police.

Try it, Bell thought grimly. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had started in Chicago, too. They, too, knew the city cold. When the race was stopped in Gary, Indiana, by lakeshore storms that the Weather Bureau predicted would last for days, he went ahead by train to scout the city.