Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 93: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AIR ADVENTURER 91 Whatever it was, it meant danger to Skip Davis and to the mail cargo in- trusted to his custody. He felt as he had the first time he had ever bailed out of a crate to join the Caterpillar Club. Abruptly Nunn screamed. Somewhere near by a dull hammering pounded savagely. Skip’s heart leaped as he recognized the staccato stutter of a submachine gun. “It’s the air pirates!’’ Nunn’s teeth were chattering. “They’re shooting at us! They'll kill us! We’d better jump. It’s our only chance in the dark. Come on. Let’s bail out before they hit the gas tanks and cremate us. To hell with the air mail! Come on!” Wildly he leaped to his feet and tugged frenziedly at Skip to follow him. Skip shook him off and slammed back the glass window panel at his side. The sound of the stuttering submachine gun was loud and distinct now. It was close. Too close, he decided grimly. The attacking plane was on his left, behind and below him. He could see the livid flashes of flame from the sput- tering gun below his left wing. Yet no bullets struck the cabin of the air-mail ship and the motors still func- tioned perfectly. Skip’s eyes sparkled bluishly and he grinned knowingly. ‘Hold on, Nunn,” he yelled. “They're right below us. I’m going to drop this crate down on them. It’ll crash their crate and this trimotor is too big to be damaged. At this altitude they'll have plenty of time to jump out and take to their parachutes. Here goes!’ Eagerly his strong hands tightened on the control wheel. Then dynamite seemed to detonate under his skull and he forgot everything he intended to do. IT WAS morning when he regained consciousness. He groaned _ feebly. Weakly he shook his throbbing head to banish the fog in which he seemed to be lost. The motion awoke waves of nausea that swept over him like tidal seas. Through bloodshot, wavering eyes he glimpsed a reeling, unsteady world. A quivering ball of fire whirled before his hazy eyes. Then the nausea abated and he felt better. Slowly, fearfully, he again opened his eyes. ‘All the symptoms of a hang-over!” he muttered ruefully. He forced a faint, white-faced grin at his own joke, as he saw that the ball of fire was the morning sun, now well above a pine-clad, unfamiliar mountain ridge. He tried to sit up, and failed. Sharp pains shot up through his arms and legs. Perplexed, he stared at himself. Tightly bound, he was lying on the dew-wet grass of a long, narrow, moun- tain-girt meadow. Thoroughly puzzled, he gazed around. His feverish eyes steadied on the mail plane, silvery and cold in the slanting, morning sunlight. The giant ship loomed almost directly over him. One wing, in fact, partly shielded him. Be- yond, toward the tail, rested a sleek, black, cabin monoplane. Remembrance flooded over Skip like an icy shower. “So my suspicions of Nunn were right,’ he muttered grimly. ‘“He’s in league with the air bandits. That ex- plains why he knew when to expect those night buzzards to show up. © He knew to the minute when they were to open fire on the mail plane. explains why he tried to stampede me into bailing out. He wanted me to jump out and desert the mail ship. “He'd have let me jump alone, too, the double-crosser, wanted me to do. That explains why we weren't hit once by that machine gun. That was just a stall, a ruse, a plant to get me excited enough to take to my parachute. “They wanted me out of the way. If I’'d jumped like they freured on, like oO CON) Ghook And that. That's what he- CO