“I’m going up,” she said.

“Now?”

“Flying clears my mind.”

“Don’t you have to replace the fabric you cut out of your airship?”

“I didn’t cut it from an essential surface.”

BELL HURRIED TO WHERE Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s biplane had struck the ground. It was a very odd coincidence that the Englishman’s accident had distracted everyone in Belmont Park, including his detectives, at the moment Harry Frost’s thugs attacked. In fact, it could not be a coincidence. Frost must have somehow engineered it.

Bell saw from a distance that the Farman had crashed nose first. Its fuselage was sticking straight up in the air like a monument, a tombstone, to poor Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who, if Bell’s suspicions were correct, was the victim of a murder, not an accident. The baronet’s wife was standing beside the wrecked biplane. A tall man in a flying helmet had his arm around her as if to comfort her. He was smoking a cigarette. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. She laughed.

Bell circled so he could see their faces. The man was Eddison-Sydney-Martin himself. He was dead white in the face, with a trickle of blood seeping from a bandage over his eye, and he was leaning heavily on Abby. But, miraculously, the Englishman was standing on his own two feet.

Bell looked again at the =wrecked Farman, and asked, “Who was driving your machine?”

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin laughed. “I’m afraid I attended the entire adventure in person.”

“Something of a miracle.”

“The framework tends to absorb the impact—all that wood and bamboo collapses in a cushiony manner, if you know what I mean. So long as one doesn’t tumble out and snap one’s neck, or one’s motor doesn’t jump its moorings and crush one, one has a fair shot at surviving a smash. Not that a chap is not immensely grateful for whatever part luck plays, what?”

“I’m sorry to see you’re out of the race.”

“I’m not out of the race. But I do need another machine straightaway.”

Bell glanced at his wife, wondering whether, as she wrote checks, she would risk sending her husband up in the air again. Abby said, “Some clever folk in New Haven are experimenting with a sort of ‘headless’ Curtiss that has a lot of go.”

“They’ve a license from Breguet, who make an excellent machine,” her husband added.

“What went wrong?” Bell asked. “Why did she go down?”

“I heard a loud bang. Then a wire stay shrieked past my head. It would appear that a counterbracer parted. Unsupported, the wing collapsed.”

“Why did the counterbracing stay break?”

“That is something of a mystery. I mean, one never encounters shoddy construction on a Farman machine.” He shrugged. “My chaps are looking into it. But it’s all in the game, isn’t it? Accidents do happen.”