She saw its dark gorge ahead, so deep and sheer that it looked like an angry giant had split the mountain with an ax. The river gleamed at the bottom. A break in the trees beside the gorge revealed a golden meadow, the first sizable opening she had seen since she had taken to the air.

She spied a tiny splash of red, like a flicker’s red crest.

It was a hunting hat worn by Marco Celere, the Italian inventor who built her flying machines. Marco was perched on the cliff, rifle slung over his back, scanning for bear through field glasses. Across the meadow, at the edge of the trees, she saw the hulking silhouette of her husband.

Harry Frost raised his rifle and aimed it at Marco.

Josephine heard the shot, louder than the motor and drive chains clattering behind her.

HARRY FROST HAD A WEIRD FEELING he had missed the Italian.

He was a seasoned big-game hunter. Since retiring rich, he had shot elk and bighorn sheep in Montana, lion in South Africa, and elephants in Rhodesia, and he could have sworn the bullet had gone high. But there was his wife’s swarthy boyfriend squirming on the edge of the cliff, hit but not dead.

Frost levered a fresh .45-70 shell into his Marlin 1895 and found him in the scope. He hated the sight of Marco Celere—oily black hair brilliantined slick to his skull, high forehead like a vaudeville Julius Caesar, thick eyebrows, deep-set dark eyes, waxed mustache curled at the tips like pigs’ tails—and he was taking great pleasure in smoothly squeezing the trigger when suddenly a strange noise clattered in his head. It sounded like the threshing machine at the farm at the Matawan Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where his enemies had locked him up for shooting his chauffeur at the country club.

The bughouse had been worse than the most monstrous orphanage in his memory. Powerful politicians and high-priced lawyers claimed credit for springing him. But it was only right to let him out. The chauffeur had been romancing his first wife.

Unbelievably, it was happening again with his new bride. He could see it written on their faces every time Josephine hit him up for more dough to pay for Marco’s inventions. Now she was begging him to buy the Italian’s latest flying machine back from his creditors so she could win the Atlantic–Pacific Cross-Country Air Race and claim the fifty-thousand-dollar Whiteway Cup.

Wouldn’t that be swell? Winning the biggest air race in the world would make his aviatrix wife and her inventor boyfriend famous. Preston Whiteway—the snoot-in-the-air, born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth San Francisco newspaper publisher who was sponsoring the race—would make them stars, and sell fifty million newspapers in the process. The chump husband would be famous, too—a famously cuckolded, fat old rich husband—the laughingstock of all who despised him.