Mysterious Aviator Read Free

doing a job on her,” he said vaguely.
    There was no point in standing there in the rain questioning a man who didn’t want to talk. The first thing was to stop those controls slamming about; I made him get up into the cockpit and tighten the belt around the stick. He obeyed me quietly. Then we set about pegging her down for the night.
    In a quarter of an hour it was done. We’d buried the garden forks beneath each wing-tip and stamped the sods down over them, lashing the wing loosely to them with the cord. That was the best that we could do in the circumstances. It was a pretty rotten job when it was done, but it only had to hold till daylight. I didn’t think it was going to blow hard.
    I went all round before we left to have a final look that everything was shipshape. The wind went sighing through the wires in the darkness, and the rain beat and drummed most desolately upon the fabric of the wings. Flashing my light under the fuselage I saw a sort of blunt snout four or five inches in diameter sticking out down below the clean lines of the body. I stooped curiously, and ran my fingers over the bottom of it. There was a lens.
    “All right,” said Lenden from the darkness behind me. “It’s a camera.”
    I straightened up and thought of the black packet that he had left in the car. But I had had enough of asking questions.
    “Let’s get along back to Under,” I said, and turned towards the lights of the car. “Unless you’re staying here?”
    He shook his head, and we went stumbling through the rain over the down towards the car. I was thoroughly wet by the time we got there, and not in the best of tempers. I’d done my best to help the man for the sake of old times, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit hurt at the way that he had received the assistance I had given him. And it was a funny business, too. I didn’t see what he was doing with a Breguet XIX in England, and I didn’t see what had brought him to make a forced landing with it in the middle of the night. And it was very evident that he didn’t want to tell me.
    We reached the car in silence, and bundled in out of the wet. I paused for a moment before pressing the starter.
    “You’d better come along back with me to my place,” I suggested.
    He seemed embarrassed at that. “It’s very good of you,” he said diffidently. “But I’d rather go straight to the station. I’m … in a hurry.”
    “You won’t do much good at the station at this time of night,” I remarked. “There isn’t a train till twenty past seven.”
    I considered for a moment, and added: “You’d better come along with me and sleep on the sofa if you want to catch that train. There’ll be a fire to sleep by, which is more than you’ll find at the station.” I eyed him thoughtfully. “There’s nobody else in the house. I’m a bachelor.” I don’t quite know why I added that.
    He hesitated again, and gave in. “All right,” he said at last. “I’d like to very much.”
    We were about five miles from Under Hall. I lived there, in the Steward’s House, just across the stable-yard from the mansion. It had been the most convenient arrangement in every way. Arner himself was over seventy years old, and too busy a man to occupy himself with the management of his estate; his only son was in Persia.
    It was no great shakes as a job, but—it suited me. The screw wasn’t much to boast about, but I had a small income of my own that was getting gradually larger with judicious nursing, and the family treated me as an equal. It’s the sort of job that I’m cut out for. I was articled to a solicitor some years before the war, though I was country-bred. I tried it again for a year after the Armistice, and then I gave it up. I should have made a rotten lawyer.
    I drove into the stable-yard at about a quarter-past two that night, left the car in the coach-house, and walked across to my own place with Lenden. The Steward’s House at Under is built into the grey stone