He leaned convulsively forward and gripped his mate by the shoulder, at the same time pointing toward the southeast and shouting through the head phones:
“Look, oh look—see what’s passing across the moon, Jack!”
Then just as suddenly did he release his clutch, to fall back in his seat, and exclaim most dramatically, with a touch of disgust in his voice:
“Shucks! It’s slipped past, dang the luck!”
“But I got it all right, Perk,” the pilot assured him.
“Then it _was_ a ship, an’ my lamps didn’t fool me, partner?” Perk cried in renewed excitement.
“As sure as you’re born, that’s what it was, brother,” Jack added.
“Headin’ south, same as we’re doin’ right now, eh, Jack?”
“You said it, buddy—just what the crate was doing, Perk.”
“What’s the answer—could it a been _him_, on his way back home with a load o’ machine guns, life they say he carries every time he crosses the border, after takin’ out a freshly printed batch o’ his flimsy stuff to soak on the honest folks back home?”
“That’s something we can only make a stab at,” replied Jack. “Chances lean that, way, I must say; but just the same it might have been some mail plane that’s got blown off its regular course, and is beating it for the home port. Then again I understand the border patrol are handling a few ships in their line of intercepting flyers making a business of smuggling Chinese aliens across the line night-times.”
“I’d give a heap to know the answer to that puzzle,” continued Perk, who disliked enigmas, and all that sort of thing calculated to make a fellow lie awake nights, bothering his poor brains. He never had been fitted by Nature for the job of being a real detective.
“We’ll never know,” his pal told him, “unless it happens we run afoul of the other crate when our courses draw closer together and if it’s Slim whose fingers grip that stick we’d rather be excused for having that happen—our job is to fetch him back _alive_, and not make him lose his life in a crash.”
“Me, I ain’t peticular just what _does_ happen to the slick guy,” Perk wound up the little talkfest by saying. “Only, when it comes to a real showdown either Slim or us got to go to the wall—dead or alive, the thing’s goin’ to be settled for keeps!”
Another thing Perk noticed—this was the fact that Jack seemed to have changed his mind with regard to making haste for the ship was racing along at top-notch speed, as though engaged in a race with some unseen rival.