“Yep, they’re gone all right. Cleared out.” Drew Lane spoke in tones scarcely above a whisper. “Of course they may be just outside, for all we know.” His hand involuntarily strayed to his hip.  
Johnny Thompson, Drew Lane and Tom Howe were still in Johnny’s tent. The adventures that were befalling Curlie Carson, for the moment, meant nothing to them. They were beyond earshot of it all. All unconscious of it, they were discussing their own affairs.
 
“I don’t think so.” Tom Howe, who seldom spoke, but whose actions spoke for him, broke the silence. “It’s my notion they have gone out for the big thing, whatever that is.”
 
“The big thing?” Johnny leaned forward eagerly.
 
40
“Sure,” Drew Lane broke in. “You don’t think such fellows as Greasy Thumb and his mob would come out here to run a tin horn gambler’s game, do you? Say! They’re supposed to be right next to the Big Shot.”
 
The Big Shot! Johnny was impressed. Who had not heard of the Big Shot, the man who headed the greatest beer running, gambling house operating gang of robbers the land has ever known?
 
“Yes,” said Tom Howe. “They’re after something big. But what it could be in a quiet little city like this is more than I can guess.”
 
Perhaps you have wondered how it came about that Drew Lane and Tom Howe, the successful young detectives of a great city’s force, were to be found in a small carnival city fifty miles from the bright lights of the greatest boulevard.
 
The truth is, a city’s detective force does not confine its activities to the city’s limits. The crooks that make a city their home belong to that city. If they choose to leave it for a time, certain of the city’s hounds of justice are likely to camp on their trails.
 
41
Summer is the time for the migration of evil doers. They thrive on crowds. In a crowd a purse may be snatched, a hold-up perpetrated, even murder done, and the criminal may at once lose himself in that crowd.
 
In winter crowds are found only in cities. Summer sees country parks, carnivals and fairgrounds thronged with people. The crooks prey upon these crowds just as the pike does on a school of perch.
 
Some city police officers are content to spend their lives patrolling a beat. They have their place and contribute their bit to the city’s happiness and safety. Others ride about in squad cars listening for trouble. Still others, like Drew Lane and Tom Howe, restless souls, are by nature free lances. They know hundreds of evil doers by sight and are ever clinging doggedly to their heels.
 
It was even so now. Having become aware of the exit of a dangerous gang of professional criminals from the city, they had followed. And here they were.
 
42
If you have read that other book, The Arrow of Fire, I need not tell you that Drew Lane, not many months out of college, impersonated a natty college youth, and Tom Howe, slight, stooped, and freckled, had prepared himself to play the role of a country boy come to the “Greatest of All Carnivals.”
 
And now here they were gathered in Johnny’s tent, for a time completely off the trail of Greasy Thumb and his gang, awaiting the break of “something big.”
 
Even as they waited, not ten miles away Johnny’s old pal, Curlie Carson, was preparing to land his plane in an unknown field at night, forced down by a voice in the air, and with the mail sack containing three precious packages sinking to earth somewhere in the void of darkness behind him.