Half an hour slipped away.

Mary V was just declaring pettishly that she could walk to Tucson and find out, while she waited for that idiotic clerk, when he called her.

Mary V listened, hung up the receiver with trembling fingers, and went to find her mother in the kitchen.
"Mommie, the plane is gone, and they are almost sure he went last night, because he was seen going that way after he left the hotel.

So he did start, just as I told him to do--and something awful has happened to him--and where's dad ?" Mary V's father, whom men for some unaccountable reason called "Sudden" when he was not present, crawled out from under the rear end of his battered touring car when Mary V's moccasins and the fluttering hem of blue kimono moved within his range of vision.

Sudden's face was smudged with black grease and the dust of the desert, and in his hand was a crescent wrench worn shiny where it had nipped nuts and bolts.
"You musta done some fancy driving the other day," he greeted his anxious-faced daughter.