MASTERS OF THE PARACHUTE MAIL

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 33, 18 November 1939, Page 3

MASTERS OF THE PARACHUTE MAIL

By PETER BENEDICT A Gripping Romantic Story of Modern Methods in an ancient 5 Smuggling Trade.

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS. Peggy Calcler got up one morning at four o’clock. Daughter of a retired army officer turned farmer, she was the business head of the family, and always the first to rise. But this morning, after a restless night, disturbed by the drone of an aeroplane, and nagged by toothache, Peggy had decided that it was no use staying longer in bed. She walked down the garden, and the adventure began. A young man and a car were in the usuallyempty garage. And the man was threatening her with a revolver. All he wanted, Peggy discovered, was* that she should shield him from the police, who arrived on motor-cycles five minutes later. Twenty-years-old Peggy, deciding on the most practical course, and inspired by the pressure of a gun in her ribs, stood at the door and successfully sent the police away. Then the man and the car took their departure with threats as to what twould happen should Peggy reveal the morning’s events. Peggy kept silent for the rest of the morning, but during the afternoon she followed the way the car tracks had come. These led her to a disused pit, in which she found a con-necting-link between the disturbing aeroplane and the young man with the car—a 'parachute, by* which had been dropped a mysterious parcel. Peggy decided to take this, and her memories, to the police. CHAPTER. II (Continued).

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it might he, but it weighed heavily for its size; her practised hand tossed it, and hazarded a guess of a pound, more or less; maybe an ounce or so one way or the other, but certainly not more than that. A compact sort of content to it, like a slab of butter but rountjed in shape instead of cut off clearly.

IN THE TRACK OF THE TYRES. She wondered if that was why the car had been therm And then she thought again of something which she had forgotten completely;'the aeroplane. It was unreasonable, perhaps, to connect the two; but coincidence surely had not dropped all these unusual trifles into her lap in one morning for nothing. There must be a connection, or at least the possibility of a connection must be taken into consideration. What it was, what it could he, she had no idea. But crooks —the vague term which she had borrowed from the films, to which this' affair seemed to belong, covered a multitude of possibilities in the personality of her enemy —Crooks do not drive out to the middle of one of the loneliest places in Britain in the middle of the night for nothing. There had to be a connection. Already she could say truthfully that she was nearing the middle of the moor. She herself would not have been so anxious to cross it at night, hut this man knew his way all right. He had done the journey before.. And why ? Why was this place chosen, if not for its very loneliness, and the fact that there were no houses within sight or earshot. Cars could camp here for the night, and' he noticed by no one. A eroplanes could land—no, bn second thoughts that;-was; impossible; landing was, she remembered, a delicate business, and undertaken at night only on properly lit flying-fields, unless a mischance made it necessary to take a big risk in order to avoid a bigger. Besides, the aeroplane last night had not landed; she had been awake for: spmeltihie,, listening to tlie hum of .it as it cruised about over the moor, and watching the lights at its ■wing-tips. Now that she came to remember it so vividly, the lights at the wing-tips had gone out very quickly; that meant they had served their purpose; and their purpose had been simply to identify the machine to its confederate below. All of which was very pretty reasoning, but so far need not bear any relation to what facts she had. Then she found the place where a car —she could not he positive of the tyrepattern here,’ hut she thought it was the same—had left the road, and taken to the grass. There was a cart-track here, long-grassed over, but usuable, indeed probably much more usable than it had been before the grass covered it; it had once led down to one of the clay-pits; hut the pit had never been more than a shallow and broad removal of the turf, and was now as green as ever it had been. It lay in a great natural amphitheatre, a perfectly regular oval in shape, and about 100 yards across at its broadest. The cart-track made a lead down into it, and that was the only break in a ring of young birch trees which rimmed the top of the slope thickly, hiding it from anyone who did not actually thread their silvery trunks and look down into the hollow. She found a place in the grassy slide down to it where a more lush growth, • fat with milkweed, invaded the 'grass; and it was easy there to see that something heavy had passed over the trailing stems and crushed them, for they lay flattened and dark against tlje resilient undei'-carpet of grass. Peggy walked slowly all roiind the arena, all over it, across it from side to side, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. She went higher, into the lower fringe of the young trees, and walked round once again. Iheie woxc furze bushes there in plenty, low-set into thelonger grass, so that sho trod warily them, twisting her dress closely round her legs.’ Hallway round, and she had found nothing to excite or "satisfy her curiosity. Naturally enough, be had taken away with him whatever ho had come to get, whether it was mere information by word ot mouth, or something more substantial. ..Then she caught a -gleam of something lying among the gorse branches, something dully white, which showed only as a crumpled piece of tissue papei left from the last picnic might show. •She parted the stems over it, gingerly, with her hands, and it assumed a more intriguing shape. It was a hanukeichief—no, it was the wrong material for that, coarser, harder, like unbleached calico. Peggy put her hand down to pick it up, though she had httie. hopes of it; and under it something harder and heavy was picked up, swinging against her wrist.

'The cloth baffled her until she wrenched herself out of the gorse bushes, and threw herself down in the grass to. spread it out before her to its fullest extent. It proved to be round, or, more properly, semi-spheroid in shape, like the half of a balloon; it was quite three feet across, though she had not believed it could be half so large; and cords were attached to rings all round its edges.. She knew what it was. She had actually seen parachutes in use, not only on the screen but actually in real life on one of her rare holidays. And this was a parachute for merchandise, and merchandise of a clandestine kind, something which could not bo sent by post, which could not travel by road transport in safety, which could como only direct from supply to demand, and without the knowledge of a third party. Hence the hollow on the moors, ideally designed for dropping things from ’planes; for given a little bombing experience on the.pilot’s part, and a light shown from below by tho confederate, the arena was a target large enough to receive all missiles, and smooth enough to conceal none of them once they were received. There could be few places so perfectly adapted to the purpose. On the under side of tho parachute she found something else of interest, of great interest; a few words pencilled on a slip of paper and pinned to tho hem of the fabric. True, they' meant nothing to her; but they might mean much to the police, who were notoriously neither so stupid nor so ill-in-formed as they were represented to he in contemporary fiction. She jead them over, and for all her enthusiasm could make nothing out of them at all.

“Quoting you: 9:5: loc. 4: no need await confirmation. Any queries through No. 4. Mere Col.” Quoting you! Why ? Someone repeating his arrangements to see if he had tbem right? “Any queries through No. 4” was easy enough, but not helpful. It proved there were at least four in the know, at any rate. Which number, she wondered, cloaked the identity of the man with, the grey car? iand what was the racket But she had the .answer to that in her hand.

She braced her fingers under the string which hound the parcel; and there she paused’. N*o, shei would not open it; not because she had any wild ideas about infernal machines concealed in it, but because everything about it even the way the cord was tied, might mean something to those who had the regular task of 'handling such things. No., she would not disturb, it in any way; she would fold up the parachute just as it was, and' take the whole thing home, to be delivered to the police in Abbott’s Ferry to-morrows w|hen she went down to the market ; and to be opened by them, and! no one else..

She walked up out of the hollow, and set out briskly foil’ home. Suddenly and .absurdly it occurred to her that she had lost something, and after -a. moment of mental searching she remembered what it was. Her nagging tooth, hopelessly outclassed in, the matter of interest and excitement, and long since given up the unequal struggle and stopped aching.

PEGGY FINDS A PARACHUTE.. It proved to be a _small parcel wrapped in strong greyish paper, and attached to the cloth by a whole complicated system of thin cords bm--"

(To be Continued.)