They tried the doors and the windows. Someone outside yelled a warning to them. They paced the floor and the baby cried a pathetic little cry. They tried to help it, but still it cried, a baffled little cry.
"Passenger plane X 52 headed toward the border missing. Nan Sherwood--"
Walker Jamieson in a newspaper office in Mexico City got no further as the news came over the wire. He grabbed a phone, asked for long distance, and called the hacienda.
Yes, they had received the news. No, they didn't know anything beyond what Walker did. Nan was traveling alone. Walker breathed a deep sigh of relief at this. He had been afraid that Alice was with her.
It was all a complete mystery. Couldn't Walker do something? This plea came from Alice herself and it wrung his heart.
"I'll try." These were the words with which he hung up and somehow they comforted the young woman on the phone. She turned to her father and said simply, "It was Walker. He'll help."
And Walker did. While government planes swooped back and forth again and again across the country looking for a wrecked plane, Walker was busy working out his own theories.
"I tell you," he was calling his New York editor, "there's a whale of a good story here, one that's bigger than anyone has guessed. This is no mere plane accident.
"How do I know? Oh, just smart that way. Can't tell you more now. Want to go through with it? It will cost plenty of dough. Need a plane and a couple of darn good pilots.
"Sky's the limit, you say? Okey-doke." With this he slammed the receiver down and was off.
He went to the United States Embassy, called the hacienda again, hired a plane and zoomed off in the direction X52 was headed for when it disappeared.
For hours he and his pilot combed the district and found nothing that satisfied Walker. Then, along about nightfall a lone shack in a deserted district attracted his attention. The plane dropped down.
Nan heard it, from her shack prison she heard it and thought that it was the X52 returning. While she waited, she didn't know what she wanted the more--to have the plane come or have it stay away. If it stayed away, she thought, that somehow, some way they could get out of the cabin, but to what end she couldn't imagine. In the meantime, she was concerned over the child and the fear that it would starve.