I didn't write anymore tickets that day.

Chapter 2 A Million In Loot

WHEN I REPORTED FOR DUTY AT THE STATION THE NEXT morning the captain called me into his office. "You know Perry, don't you, the cashier of the Glenora National?"

"Sire."

"We just got a call from the president of the bank; I just hung up as you came in. For some reason they have been suspicious about Perry, and two or three of them went to the bank this morning, figuring Perry wouldn't be there on a Sunday, to have a look around. The place has been cleaned: nearly a million in negotiable securities, gold and currency gone. They tell me he's been building an airship, and they got a hunch he's going to try to make his getaway in that. The cruisers are all out, but just as soon as one of 'em calls in I'll send it down to his hangar. In the meantime you beat it down there and make the pinch if he hasn't got away, and hold him till the car gets there. "

"How about a warrant?"

"To hell with a warrant; beat it!"

"O.K. chief."

Here was a job I didn't have any stomach for, arresting an old friend like Billy Perry; but a cop's a cop and he can't always be as choosy about whom he arrests as I had been the day before when Daisy burned up the concrete.

Before I got to Billy's hangar I saw that he hadn't gotten away yet. A tiny little blimp was outside the hangar, and there was a little crowd, mostly boys, hanging around watching. Billy was on the ground when I pulled up; he hadn't seen me coming; but when he happened to look up and saw the uniform, he went white.

He didn't recognize me then, and he didn't wait to look again. He just jumped through the open doorway of the gondola and tried to close it after him. It was a sliding door, and it stuck. Before he could get it to work I was inside with him. Then he turned and faced me. His eyes appeared strange to me; there was fear in them and something else, too-something terrible. It was just a suggestion of something that I seemed to glimpse in passing.

Then he recognized me and his expression altered. "Why, hello, Lafitte! Come down to have a look at the flying flivver?"

In the distance, approaching, I heard the wail of a cruiser's siren. He heard it, too; I saw his glance dart through the window in the direction of the sound.

I shook my head. "I came after you, Billy."

"Me! " He pretended great surprise.

"I'm sorry, Billy. Will you come along quietly with me?" I couldn't be hard-boiled with a fellow I'd known all my life and played with as a kid.

After his expression changed, and I saw that thing in his eyes; but his words disarmed me. Nearer now, the siren screeched through the streets of Glenora.

Perry shrugged. "All right, Johnny. But you've never seen the wind-blown Ford; come and take a look at her before we go." He turned toward a small compartment in the forward end of the gondola. "Here's the control room."

I glanced through a window and saw the cruiser turning into the field toward the hangar; then I followed Perry into the control room. "Not much to it, is there?" he remarked. He laid a hand upon a lever. "This," he said, "is an invention of mine. " He pushed it forward.

"What is it?" I asked.

"The mooring release." He commenced to laugh. Then I heard men shouting, and again I looked through a window; I saw the crew of the cruiser running toward us, shouting.