“I do know,” Bell said sincerely. “I’m often away from my fiancée. I’m lucky on this case, as she’s around filming the race for Mr. Whiteway, so I get to see her now and then. What’s your girl’s name?”

“Daisy.”

“Pretty name. What’s her last name?”

“Ramsey.”

“Daisy Ramsey. There’s a mouthful . . . But wait. If you marry, she’ll be Daisy Weed.” Bell said it with a grin that coaxed a wan smile out of the boy.

“Oh, yes. We kid about that.” The smile faded.

Bell said, “If something is troubling you, son, is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, thank you, sir, I’m O.K.”

Eddie Edwards, the white-haired head of the Kansas City office, approached Bell, muttering, “We got trouble.”

Bell hurried to the hangar car with him.

Andy Moser, who had been working nearby, tightening the Eagle’s wing-stay turnbuckles, said, “You sure you’re O.K., Eustace? Mr. Bell seems concerned about you.”

“His eyes go through you like iced lightning.”

“He’s just looking out for you.”

Eustace Weed prayed that Andy was right. Because what Isaac Bell had spotted on his face was his sudden horrified realization of what they would force him to do with the copper tube of water sealed with paraffin wax.

He had been hoping that the criminals threatening Daisy had changed their minds. No one approached him in Peoria or Columbia, or Hannibal, Missouri, to tell him what to do with it. After Hannibal, where the race crossed the Mississippi River, he assumed it would happen in Kansas City. It was the only real city on the map since Chicago, and he had developed a picture in his mind of big-city saloonkeepers knowing one another but disdaining their counterparts in small towns. So he had dreaded Kansas City.

But no one had approached him there, either, nor when the race pulled up on the far side of the Missouri River. There had even been a letter from Daisy waiting for him, and she sounded fine. This very morning, camped by the Kansas River outside Topeka, preparing Mr. Bell’s machine to head south and west over the empty plains toward Wichita, the terrified mechanician had begun to wonder, would the whole nightmare simply go away? Trouble was, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And just now, while Mr. Bell watched him strain the gas before mixing the fuel, Eustace Weed suddenly knew that Harry Frost’s man would order him to drop the tube in Isaac Bell’s flying-machine fuel tank.