“But you can’t watch over her forever.”

“We don’t have to.” Bell held up the pictures again. “These two will be locked back in Joliet prison to resume serving well-deserved twenty-year sentences. This saloonkeeper is about to go out of business and open a small dry-goods store in Seattle, a city to which he is moving for his health.”

ON A REMOTE STRETCH of dun-colored ranchland between Los Angeles and Fresno, the Southern Pacific West Side Line that the air racers were supposed to follow crossed the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Intersecting at that same point were local short-line railroads that served the raisin growers and cattlemen of the San Joaquin Valley. The resultant junction of rails, switches, and underpasses was so confusing that dispatchers and train conductors called it the Snake Dance. The Whiteway Cup Air Race stewards had marked the correct route with a conspicuous canvas arrow.

Dave Mayhew, Harry Frost’s telegrapher, climbed down from a pole and read aloud his Morse alphabet transcriptions.

“Josephine’s way in the lead. Joe Mudd had trouble getting off the ground. Now he’s stuck in a cotton field in Tipton.”

“Where’s her support train?” asked Frost.

“Keeping pace. Right under her.”

“Where’s Isaac Bell?”

“The Tulare dispatcher heard his motor sputtering when he saw Bell and Josephine fly over. No one’s spotted him since. The last dispatcher who spotted her said Josephine was flying alone.”

“Where is Bell’s support train?”

“Sidelined north of Tulare—probably where he went down.”

Harry Frost pulled his watch from his vest and confirmed the time. By this hour, the water in his gas should have made Isaac Bell smash.

“Get the auto,” he told Mayhew.

With decent luck, Bell was dead. But, at the very least, the Van Dorn posed no threat to Frost’s plan to shoot Josephine out of the sky and wreck Whiteway’s support train.

To Stotts, Frost said, “Move the pointer.”

Mike Stotts ran onto the Southern Pacific main line, rolled up the canvas arrow pointing north and unrolled it pointing northwest up the short line that angled toward the dry hills that rimmed the valley to the west. Then he threw the switch to divert Josephine’s train in the same direction.

Dave Mayhew drove a brand-new Thomas Flyer onto the short line. Frost and Stotts climbed in, and the three raced northwest.

Chapter 39

39

THE ONLY NOISE ISAAC BELL HEARD was the wind humming in the wing stays as he volplaned his yellow machine in gently descending circles. Beef cattle grazed peacefully under him, and a flock of white pelicans stayed on course, proof that he was passing over the ground as silently as a condor.