He sat bolt upright at dawn, thunderstruck by the clatter of threshing machines. His heart pounded, as he listened for the squealing of the wheels when the guards rolled the morning breakfast slop down the corridor and the clanging of the ladle striking the cauldron. The same morning racket he still remembered from the orphanage. Only, gradually, did he begin to notice things. The bed was soft and the room was quiet. He glanced at the open windows, where white curtains fluttered in a warm breeze. There were no bars. He wasn’t in the bughouse. They hadn’t dragged him back to the orphanage. A smile crept across Harry Frost’s face. Not threshing machines. Flying machines. Morning practice at Belmont Park.

He had breakfast in bed, three short miles from the racetrack where Josephine and her new admirers were tuning their airships for the race.

Chapter 6

6

“WHERE’S JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell inquired of the Van Dorn detectives guarding the gate to the Belmont Park Race Track infield.

“In the air, Mr. Bell.”

“Where’s Archie Abbott?”

“Over by the yellow tent.”

Bell had driven out to Belmont in a borrowed Pierce-Arrow to interview Josephine about her husband’s habits and the associates he might recruit. As the only person who had spent time with him in his reclusive years, she might even have an idea of where he would hide.

Bell saw right off that Whiteway had chosen a perfect place to start the air race. The Belmont infield was enormous. Encompassed by the longest racetrack in the country, a mile and a half, it was the size of a small farm. Nearly fifty acres of flat grass inside the track were overlooked by a grandstand that could seat thousands of paying spectators. It offered numerous two-hundred-yard stretches of grass on which the machines could gather speed to take to the sky and return to the ground, as well as room for tents, temporary wooden aeroplane hangars, trucks, and autos. The rail yard for the support trains was just on the other side of the stands.

Bell breathed deeply of the air—an exhilarating mix of burnt oil, rubber, and gasoline—and felt instantly at home. It smelled like a race-car meet made all the richer by the scent of the fabric dope that the aviators varnished their machines with to seal the fabric covering the frames. The ground was alive with machines and men rushing about, like at an auto meet. But here at Belmont, all eyes were aimed at the sharp blue sky.

Machines swept into the air, swooped and darted about—boundless as birds but a hundred times bigger. A vast variety of shapes and sizes sailed through the sky. Bell saw airships triple the length of racing cars lumber overhead on wings that spread forty feet, and smaller ones flitted by, some flimsy, some supple as dragonflies.