“This is my idea! Nothing is what it seems to be. Jeff pretends to be a joy-ride pilot, but he never takes up passengers—hardly ever. The engine dies, only it’s Jeff stopping the ‘juice.’ This old amphibian crate looks as though it’s ready to come to pieces and yet, somebody has been working on it—that chewing gum wasn’t stale and hard, because I made sure. Well—suppose that Jeff was in a gang of international jewel robbers——”
“Next you’ll be saying the letter was in a registered envelope from California and was written in Cairo!” laughed Dick.
“Or in New York!” corrected Sandy meaningly.
“Jewel robbers,” Larry was serious. “I don’t think that holds water, Sandy. First of all, Jeff claims to know that the emerald imitations had acid poured on them—acid to destroy them. That must be some chemical that corrodes or eats emeralds. Now, robbers wouldn’t——”
“Why not?” Sandy was stubborn. “Suppose they had gone to all that trouble to get into the suite and discovered the false emeralds? What would you do?”
“I might rip them apart—but do you think robbers carry acids along to eat up emeralds if they think they are going to profit by taking them?”
“Suspicious Sandy,” Dick began to chant a rhyme he invented on the spur of the moment, “Suspicious Sandy, Suspicious Sandy, he thinks everything is like April-Fool candy! Nothing is what it seems to be and soon he’ll suspect both Larry and me!”
Sandy turned away, hurt, and strolled to the amphibian with its retractable wheels for land use and its pontoons for setting down on water.
Jeff called and signaled that all was ready. Larry summoned Sandy but the latter lingered, while Dick, a little sorry he had taunted so much, followed Larry toward the waiting airplane. But Sandy, scowling, hesitated whether he would go or be angry and refuse to join the Sky Patrol. Then, as he clambered onto the forward bracing of the under wing and leaned on the cockpit cowling, his face assumed a startled, intent expression.
There was no chewing gum in the craft!
His first impulse was to rush out and declare his discovery.
His next was to keep silent and avoid further taunting.
“Jeff chews gum,” he mused. “He pretended not to know any was in this amphibian. But it’s gone! Well,” he told himself, “I’ll watch and see what he’s up to. He’ll give himself away yet!”
Assuming an air of having forgotten all about Dick’s rhyme, he went to his place in the seat behind Jeff and the instant his safety belt was snapped Jeff signaled to a farmer who had come over to investigate and satisfy himself that the airplane had legitimate business there; the farmer kicked the stones used as chocks from under the landing tires and Jeff opened up the throttle.
With wind unchanged the trees which had complicated their landing were behind them. Jeff’s only problem, Larry saw, was to get the craft, heavier with its wing tanks full, off the short runway and over the hangar.
“If he gets a ‘dead stick’ here,” Larry mused, “it will be just too bad!”
He had no trouble lifting the craft and flying for seconds just above the ground to get flying speed after the take-off, then giving it full gun and roaring up at a safe angle to clear the obstruction.
“We’re off!” exulted Dick.
They were—off on an adventure that was to start with a mad race and terminate—in smoke!
Down the backbone of Long Island, not very high, they flew. The farms, landscaped estates and straight roads of the central zone were in striking contrast to the bay and inlet dented North Shore with its fleets of small boats, its fishing hamlets, rolling hills and curving motor drives and the seaside with its beach resorts, yellow-brown sand and tall marsh grass clustered between crab-infested salt water channels.
Passing over the fashionable Summer homes of wealthy people at Southampton, they held the course until Montauk Point light was to the left of the airplane, then Jeff swung in a wide circle out over the desolate sand dunes, the ooze and waving eel-grass of marshes and the tossing combers of the surf.
“There’s the hydroplane!” Dick, leaning over the left side, made a pointing gesture. Larry, watching seaward, had not been looking in the right direction. Sandy, alert to pass signals, touched Jeff and received a nod from the pilot.
The first step of the plan was taken. They had made contact with the small, speedy craft which, on a later signal that they had “picked up” the incoming yacht, would speed out to sea to meet her.
“Now we’ll climb!” decided Sandy.
Climb they did, until the sea dropped down to a gray-green, flat expanse and only the powerful binoculars Larry was using could pick out the cruising hydroplane slowly verging away from the shore in an apparently aimless voyage.
“This isn’t such a bad scheme, at that,” Dick concluded mentally. “If there should be anybody on the lookout—robbers or somebody who wants to see what’s going on—no one will see any connection between us passing here and then climbing to get a good wind for a run down the coast toward Maine, and a hydroplane that’s acting as if it had some engine trouble.”
Higher and higher they went, probably out of sight of anyone without strong field glasses, and while they swung in a wide circle, Larry’s binoculars swept the horizon.
“Smoke!” He turned the focusing adjustment a trifle. “Too soon to signal—it may be an oil-burning steamer and not the yacht—or a rum-runner of a revenue patrol—it’s thick, black oil smoke, the sort the yacht would give—it is a small boat—yes——”
His signal, relayed through Dick and Sandy to Jeff, shifted the gently banked curve into a straighter line and swiftly the lines of the oncoming craft, miles away, became clear.
Larry verified his decision that the low, gray hull, with its projecting bowsprit, the rakish funnel atop the low trunk of the central cabin, and the yacht ensign, identified theTramp.
The signal went forward.
Jeff, glancing back, caught Sandy’s nod.
“Now we’ll dive to where the hydroplane can see us, and the dive will signal the yacht that we’re the airplane they’ll be watching for,” Dick decided.
The maneuver was executed, ending in a fairly tight circle after Jeff had skilfully leveled out of the drop.
“Smoke was trailing over the yacht’s stern,” Sandy murmured. “Now it’s blowing off to the starboard side. She’s swinging toward us.”
Through his glasses Larry saw the hydroplane awaken the sea to a split crest of foam, saw a cascade of moiling water begin to chase her, and knew that the tiny craft was racing out to the meeting.
“All’s well!” he grinned as Dick looked back.
Dick nodded and passed the report to Sandy.
Sandy did not smile. Instead, as they swung, he scanned the sky. That was not his instructions, but it was his determined plan.
“I’ll see the amphibian Jeff was working on, nights,” he mused. “It ought to be in sight now——”
Convinced that both the hydroplane and the yacht would have located the spot on the sea where they would meet, Jeff broke the tedium of his tight circle by a reverse of controls, banking to the other side and swinging in a climbing spiral to the right.
Closer and closer together came the swift turbine propelled yacht and the surface-skimming hydroplane.
“I was right!” shouted Sandy, unheard but triumphant—and also a little startled that he had so closely guessed what would happen.
He swung his head, signaled Dick, waved an arm, pointing. Dick and Larry stared, while Sandy poked Jeff and repeated his gestures.
On the horizon, coming at moderate speed, but growing large enough so that there could be no error of identification, came the amphibian. Its dun color and its tail marking were unmistakable.
“The amphibian!” cried Larry. “I wonder why——”
“I wonder who’s in it?” Dick mused as Jeff cut the gun and went into a glide, the better to get a look at the oncoming craft low over the seashore.
Larry realized with a pang that he was neglecting Jeff’s plan.
He looked down.
No glass was needed to show him the yacht, swiftly being brought almost under them by its speed and theirs. A quarter of a mile away was the hydroplane, coming fast. A mile to the south flew the approaching amphibian. And in every mind—even Jeff’s, had they been able to read it—was the puzzled question, “Why?”
Jeff began to climb in a tight upward spiral to keep as well over the scene of activity as he could without being in the way.
“And to be high enough to interfere if something has slipped,” Larry decided on the purpose in Jeff’s mind. Then, as the amphibian came roaring up a hundred yards to their left, and in a wide swing began to circle the yacht, Sandy screeched in excitement and pointed downward.
“Something’s happening!” he screamed.
Swiftly Larry threw his binoculars into focus as he swept the length of the yacht to discover what caused Sandy’s cry, for with a wing in his way he did not see the stern. They swung and he gave a shout of dismay and amazement.
“Somebody’s overboard!”
Instantly he corrected himself.
“No—but there’s a life preserver in the water—it was thrown over but the yacht isn’t stopping.” His glasses swept the bridge, the deck.
“No excitement—now, I wonder——”
The lenses brought the stern and after cabin into view.
Turning away, back to his view, in a dark dress, a woman who had been at the extreme after rail was racing out of sight behind the cabin.
“There’s a life preserver in the water!” Dick could see it without glasses. Sandy looked.
“The amphibian is making for it!” he yelled.
“The hydroplane can’t get there in time!” shouted Larry.
None of them realized that Jeff’s roaring engine drowned their cries.
“Jeff! Look——” Wildly Sandy gesticulated.
Fast and high, in a swift glide, coming like a hawk dropping to its prey, a light seaplane, skimming the edge of an incoming fog bank, showed its slim, boatlike fuselage and wide wingspan, with two small pontoons at wingtips to support it in the surf.
There was a swift drop of their own craft as Jeff dived, came into a good position and zoomed past the yacht, close to it.
Wildly, as those on the bridge came into clear view, Sandy, Larry, Dick and Jeff gesticulated, pointing astern. Bells were jangled, the yacht was sharply brought up by reversed propellers and a tender was swiftly being put down from its davits, an excited sailor working to start its engine, even as it was lowered.
Then, helpless to take active part because they had no pontoons, the Sky Patrol witnessed the maddest, strangest race staged since aviation became a reality. And the prize? A mysteriously flung life preserver!
While Sandy watched the amphibian and Dick stared at the rapidly approaching sea plane, Larry gazed at the swift hydroplane and noted the feverish attempt on the yacht to get its tender going as it struck the surging water.
Swiftly he snapped the binoculars to his eyes as they receded from the yacht in the onrush of their zoom.
A woman in dark clothes had rushed behind the after cabin.
She must have tossed the life preserver from the stern.
But there was a woman on the bridge with the white uniformed captain and a navigating officer. She was in dark clothes! But she had been there all the time. He suddenly recalled the French maid Jeff had mentioned in the hotel. That answered his puzzled wonder. He knew who had thrown that life preserver, at any rate. It could not be the mistress. It left only the maid to suspect.
Fast as a dart the hydroplane cut the surges.
“She’ll get there—they see the life preserver!” he cried, looking past the tilting wing as they executed a split-S to turn to head back the quickest possible way.
“The amphibian can set down on the water and she’ll pass the place—already there’s somebody climbing out of the front cockpit onto the wing—to grab the thing as they pass!” Sandy muttered.
“That seaplane is coming fast!” mused Dick. “What a race! It will be a wonder if there isn’t a smash when they all come together!”
It took only seconds for the race to conclude.
With a warning cry that was drowned by their engine noise, Larry saw that the amphibian was in such a line of flight that it must be crossed by the course of the hydroplane—and from the respective speeds, as well as he could judge, there might be either a collision or one of the craft must alter its course.
“The seaplane is almost down on the water—and coming like an arrow toward that white preserver!” gasped Dick. “Will its wings hit the yacht?”
“Can’t we do anything at all?” Sandy wondered desperately.
Evidently Jeff either caught his thought or decided on a course through his own quick wit.
Opening the throttle full-on, he kicked rudder and depressed his left wing. Around came the airplane. Skidding out of her course from the momentum and the sharp application of control, she moved sharply upward and sidewise.
Deftly Jeff caught the skid.
Righted, Sandy exultantly screeched at the maneuver.
Flying fast, in a steep descent, they went across the nose of the amphibian, and in the turmoil of their propeller wash she went almost out of control, and before her pilot caught up his stability the hydroplane raced across her path in a slanting line and made for the small round object bobbing in the trough between two swells.
But that gave the seaplane an advantage.
Quick to take it, dipping a wing and kicking rudder, the seaplane’s pilot swerved a little, leveled off, and set down in a smother of foam, and on his wing also a man climbed close to the tip!
“Where’s the one who was on the amphibian wing?” Larry wondered.
“In the water, spilled by our wash,” he decided.
He had no time to pay attention to that situation. The imminent culmination of the race chained his gaze.
“The tender is almost there—oh!” gasped Sandy, “the seaplane must be rammed by the tender!”
But the yacht’s boat, with its motor hastily started, and cold—lost way as the engine sputtered and died!
Slackening speed, the seaplane raced along until, with a hand clinging to a brace and his body leaning far over the dancing waves, its passenger on the wing scooped up the life preserver.
Almost immediately the seaplane began to get off the water.
The tender, its engine missing badly, turned its attention to the man in the water, but before it could get to him or near him Sandy, Dick and Larry saw that he caught the tail assembly of the amphibian and scrambling over the fuselage as the craft picked up speed, fell flat on his stomach just behind the pilot’s place and clung tightly while the craft got “on the step” and went into the air in a swift moil of foam and a roaring of its engine.
Outgeneraled, the hydroplane cut speed and swung toward the yacht, followed by the tender.
The race was out of their hands.
“It depends on us!” panted Sandy. “Jeff—get after that seaplane!”
Their pilot needed no instructions.
Kicking rudder and dipping a wing, almost wetting it in the spray of a breaking comber, he flung his airplane into a new line of flight, reversed controls, giving opposite rudder and aileron, got his craft on a stable keel and gave it the gun as he snapped up the flippers to lift her nose and climb after the retreating ’plane.
Far behind them in their swift chase, with every ounce of power put into their engine and their whole hearts urging it to better speed, the Sky Patrol saw the amphibian swerve toward shore and give up the try for whatever that precious life preserver had attached to it.
That something had been cast overboard, tied to the float, was obvious to Larry, Dick and Sandy.
Nothing else explained its employment.
What a chase! Speed was in their favor, because the seaplane, fast as it was, lacked the power of their engine which they learned later that Jeff had selected for that very quality.
Overhauling the seaplane was not the question.
Their problem was to get above it, to ride it down, force it to take the sea or to come down in a crackup on shore if that must be—before it could lose itself in that dull, gloomy, lowering bank of fog ahead.
For that fog the seaplane was making at full speed.
“Climb, Jeff!” Sandy begged, hoping their pilot could ride down the craft ahead.
But Jeff held a level course. He had to, in order to maintain the advantage of speed. He thought he could get alongside their quarry before the mist swallowed it, hid it, ended the pursuit.
In that he was beaten by only a hundred feet.
Into the murky folds of the thick mist dived the seaplane.
Hardly more than two hundred feet behind, they felt the cold, clammy fingers of the cloud touch their shrinking faces.
Jeff cut the gun.
They strained their ears.
Where was the seaplane? Would it climb above the murk, glide straight through it and down, swerve and glide—or dive out and risk leveling off and setting down just beneath the bank so that its rapidly coming folds, and the silent sea would make a safe and comfortable concealment?
Slowly, almost in a “graveyard” glide, so flat was the descent, to hold flying speed and stay as high as they could, their airplane moved along. They listened.
Only the raucous cry of a seagull cut into that chill silence!
The fog kept its secrets.
“This can’t last long, for us,” thought Larry. “We’ll be down to the water before we know it!”
Much the same idea made Dick peer anxiously over the cowling.
“They must be listening for us, in the seaplane,” Sandy decided. “I know there was a pilot and the man who got the life preserver. I wish I could have gotten a good look at either one, but the pilot had goggles and his helmet to hide his face and the other man had his back turned to us. Where can they be? What are they doing?”
They could not wait for the answer.
Through a thin cleft in the heavy mist, not far below them the dark outlines of eel-grass, flanking two sides of a channel in the swampy shore line stood out, for an instant, clear and menacing.
“Jeff!” warned Sandy.
Dick echoed the cry. Jeff had already caught the threat of that swamp below them. They could not risk going a foot lower. The pilot opened his throttle, picking up climbing speed to the roar of his engine.
“We had to give in first,” Larry decided ruefully.
Not only had they given in. Jeff, it appeared, had given up. In thickening mist the risks were too great.
They had given up.
Jeff was climbing for the top of the bank, where he could come into the clear, get some idea of his location and return to report defeat to the yacht whose captain probably lay-to, waiting for news.
Nor did Jeff again cut the gun to listen.
“Oh, well,” Dick was always hopeful, “maybe we’ll get a ‘break’ sooner or later.”
Up, and still climbing, the airplane continued through the fog.
Low banks favored them.
With suddenly thinning rifts parting overhead they shot out into the clear sunlight. Beneath, stretching up disappointed fingers of murk lay the bank of fog.
“Look—toward shore!” screamed Sandy.
Instantly the situation became clear to the Sky Patrol.
Having heard their own engine, the pilot of the seaplane had decided to risk a dash out of the fog and to try to escape.
Their own airplane had been headed south, down the coast.
When they climbed above the lower shoreward mist the cry from Sandy drew their attention to the seaplane, even higher than they were, and going fast across the narrow end of the island.
“Now we can catch them and ride them down!” exulted Dick.
Jeff dropped a wing sharply—kicking rudder at the same time. Onto the trail swung their craft. Righting it Jeff gave the engine all it would take, climbing.
“They’re getting ahead—getting away from us!” cried Sandy.
Larry, more conversant with flying tactics, decided that Jeff meant to get to a higher level than they occupied, to outclimb the less flexible seaplane, so that he could swoop upon it with the advantage of elevation to help him overtake it.
Into the thousands their altimeter swung its indicator.
Three thousand feet! Another five hundred! Four thousand!
“Now we must be higher than they are!” Larry muttered. “Jeff—for crickety-Christmas’ sake—catch them!”
Jeff leveled and their engine roared. In a quartering course, evidently making in an airline for some point on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound, the seaplane held its way.
Gaining in a very flat descent, calculated, as Sandy could see, to bring them either alongside or—if fortune favored them—onto the tail of the other craft, Jeff drew closer.
The seconds slipped by. The North Shore was almost under them.
Swiftly the distance closed up between the racing flyers.
“They’re diving!” cried Sandy.
“Something’s gone wrong!” Dick yelled. “She’s out of control!”
The seaplane sheered to one side in a violent slip as her pilot evidently tried to bank and kick rudder and lost control.
The seaplane wavered, caught itself in a steadier line. In the pursuing airplane three youthful faces grew intent.
What was wrong?
“She’s diving!” screamed Sandy.
“Something has happened!” decided Larry.
Down, almost like a hawk falling to its prey, the seaplane went through the still air.
“Somebody’s on the wing—he’s jumping clear!” shouted Dick.
Trembling with excitement Larry caught up the binoculars. They were still too far behind for clear vision unaided by glasses.
“He has that life preserver in one hand—there he goes!” cried Dick.
Silhouetted against the northern blue of the sky, with a tiny white circle showing sharply in the sunlight, the leaping person fell clear of the diving seaplane, while Larry, shaking with excitement, tried to focus his glasses and train them on the falling object.
“He’s harnessed to a parachute—there goes the ripcord!” Sandy would have leaped to his feet but for his restraining safety belt.
“There goes the ’chute!” Dick was equally thrilled.
The parachute opened.
“The life preserver snapped out of his hand!” Larry muttered, giving up his effort to locate the moving objects in the glass and using his unaided eyes to view the tragedy—or whatever it would prove to be.
The life preserver was jerked away by the jar when the parachute arrested the fall sharply, making it impossible for a handgrip to retain the rope of the swiftly plunging white circle.
“Why doesn’t the other one jump clear!” Dick’s heart seemed to be tearing to get out through his tightening throat. Which one was under the parachute? Which stayed in the falling seaplane—and why?
An arm of mist, swinging far over the land, intervened between their vision and the shore line.
Into it, hidden from sight, the seaplane flashed.
Through its concealing murk flicked the tiny round object of mystery.
More deliberately, settling down, first the hanging bulk of the unknown man, then the spreading folds of the parachute drifted into mist—and mystery.
The chase was ended.
But the mystery had hardly begun!
Two courses were offered to the Sky Patrol with Jeff.
“We can try to drop down into the fog,” called Larry to Dick as their pilot, with closed throttle, nosed down to get closer to the scene of the tragedy.
“But we can’t set down or do anything—and we can’t see much for the fog,” objected Dick. “I think we ought to go back and drop a note onto the yacht, telling the people to come here in a boat.”
Larry agreed with this sensible suggestion and Dick, scribbling a note, passed it to Sandy. After a glance the younger of the trio gave it to Jeff. The pilot nodded when he read it.
Again the engine roared as they swung around, laying a course to take them above the rolling mist, toward the end of the island around which—or beyond which—the yacht should be cruising or waiting.
“It will be hard to find the yacht in this fog,” Sandy mused, but as they flew along he, with the others, scanned the low clouds for some open rift through which to catch a possible glimpse of the water craft. A slantwise gust of wind crossed the cockpits, giving them new hope. If a breeze came to blow aside the mist they might have better chances to see the yacht.
In steadily increasing force, and gradually coming oftener, the puffs of moving air increased their confidence.
The fog was thinning under them, blowing aside, swirling, shifting.
With the breeze from the new direction, as they steadily got closer to the end of the island, coming over a spot where a break in the cloud showed brown-yellow sand and rushing white surf beyond the wide level beach, Sandy’s alert eyes caught sight of something for an instant. Prodding Jeff, he indicated the object.
As Jeff swooped lower, inspecting, Dick caught a good glimpse of the tilted, quiet focus of Sandy’s gesture.
“There’s the amphibian,” Dick muttered. “Stranded—cracked up, maybe. But—if we could get down and land, we could use her, two of us could, to go to the swamp and see what’s there—before anybody else gets to the life preserver the jewels must have been tied to.”
He passed forward, through Sandy, a note.
Jeff agreed, made his bank and turn, as Sandy saw the drift of a plume of smoke on the horizon, to get into the wind.
Coming back, dropped low, Jeff scanned the beach.
“It looks safe for a landing—pretty solid beach,” Larry concluded, and evidently Jeff felt the same way for he climbed in his turning bank, got the wind right and came down, using his engine with partly opened throttle to help him settle gradually until the landing wheels touched when the tail dropped smartly, the gun was cut, and the sand, fairly level and reasonably well-packed, dragged them to a stop.
Hurriedly the youthful Sky Patrol tumbled onto the sand, digging cotton plugs out of their ears now that the roar of the motor no longer made them essential.
“It’s the amphibian, and no mistake!” Larry cried, running down the beach toward the titled craft.
“If she isn’t damaged,” he told Dick, “you and Jeff, or Jeff and I could fly to the swamp in her.”
“You go.” Dick was generous to the friend he admired, and who was almost a year older. “It would need a cool, quick head to handle whatever you might find in the swamp. You go.”
That also was Sandy’s opinion when, after a rapid inspection, they agreed with Jeff that the amphibian, set down with only a strained tail skid and a burst tire in the landing wheel gear, was usable.
“But there’s no gas,” objected Larry, noting the indicator in the control cockpit. “See, the meter says zero!”
“It was that way when I looked before,” Sandy said. “That was why I didn’t think anybody meant to use it——”
“Easy to fool you on that,” Jeff declared. “It’s been disconnected. I wouldn’t be surprised if that-there tank wasn’t nearly half full. They had it all fixed and ready——”
“Let’s go, then,” urged Larry. “Dick, look over the pontoons for strains, will you? She may have struck one of them—she has tipped over part way, maybe hit one of the pontoons.”
Dick, examining with the thoroughness of an expert, with Jeff’s and his chum’s life perhaps depending on his care, stated that he saw no damage to the waterproofed coverings of the water supports. Declaring that they would stand by and watch the airplane, Sandy and Dick watched Larry and Jeff get settled, Dick spun the propeller to pump gas into the still heated cylinders, Jeff gave the “switch-on—contact!” call, Dick, pulling down on the “prop,” sprang aside to avoid its flailing blades, and the amphibian’s engine took up its roar.
Acting as a ground crew, Dick righted the craft by thrusting up the wing which was evidently not seriously damaged, while Sandy, as the motor went into its full-throated drone, shook the tail to lift the skid out of the clogging sand. His eyes shielded from the sand, blasted back by the propeller wash, he leaped sidewise and backward as the elevators lifted the tail and the amphibian shook itself in its forward lunge, lifted, flew within two inches of the sand, and then began to roar skyward.
“He’s drawing up the wheels, now,” Sandy called to Dick.
“They won’t be any good, with that burst tire—he’ll have to set down in water anyhow,” Dick explained. Sandy nodded.
Waving to his two watching comrades as they grew smaller to his peering eyes, Larry turned his attention to the work of scanning, from the forward place, all the indented shore line, north, that the mist had uncovered.
To their left, as they sped on, the lighthouse poked its tower out of the drifting, dispelling fog.
Soon Jeff dropped low, diminished the throb of the engine, cruising while Larry kept watch.
“Yonder it is!” Larry’s hand gestured ahead and to the side.
Jeff, peering, located the wing of the seaplane, the fuselage half submerged in muddy channel ooze, the tail caught on the matted eel-grass.
In the mouth of a broad channel they touched water and ran out of momentum with the wings hovering over the grassy bank to either side.
“Now what?” demanded Jeff. “We can’t go in any closer.”
Already Larry had his coat and shoes off. Stripping them off, and with no one to observe, removing all his clothes, he lowered himself onto a pontoon and thence to the water, chilly but not too cold on the hot June afternoon.
Striking out with due care not to get caught by any submerged tangle of roots or grasses, Larry swam the forty feet.
“The pilot’s in his cockpit—” he gasped. “He’s—he isn’t——”
“Get that collapsible boat on the back of the tank, there!” urged Jeff, “and come back for me.”
It took inexperienced Larry some time to open and inflate the tubular rubber device used for supporting survivors of any accident to the seaplane while afloat.
“He’s—I think he’s alive,” Jeff declared fifteen minutes later. “That’s a bad slam he’s had on the forehead, though.” He lifted the silent pilot’s bruised head, put a hand on his heart, nodded hopefully and bade Larry dash water in the man’s face.
The cold, salty liquid seemed at first to have no effect.
“He must have hit himself trying to get out,” Larry surmised.
Jeff shook his head.
“His parachute isn’t loosened or unfolded,” he responded, working to get the spark of life to awaken in the man he bent over. “No, Larry, from the looks of things—somebody hit him, while they were away up in the air, and jumped—with that life preserver.”
“Where is he now? If only I could get my hands on him. I wonder who it was?”
Jeff paid no attention to Larry’s natural anger and wonder.
“He’s coming around—fella—who did this-here to you?”
The eyes fluttered open, the lips trembled.
Larry, clinging to a brace, his feet set on a strut, bent closer.
“What happened? Who done this?” repeated Jeff.
The man, before he sank again into silence, uttered one word—or half a word:
“Gast—” he muttered.
“Gast—was it somebody named Gaston?” asked Jeff.
The man did not respond.
“Never mind,” Larry urged. “Can you get him into the boat, somehow, Jeff? You ought to land him at a hospital—or at the nearest airport. There’s a medical officer at every one—for crack-ups. Or, fly and telephone for help!”
“Would you be afraid to stay here if I take him to an airport?”
“No!” declared Larry, stoutly.
Without further words or conscious movements from the silent pilot they managed to get him unhooked from his belt and parachute harness, to lower him, precariously limp, into the rubber boat, which Larry held onto as Jeff, half supporting his inert co-pilot, propelled it to their own craft.
As they moved slowly along Larry, fending off a clump of tough grass into which the breeze sought to drift their rubber shell, caught sight of something dimly white, far in among the muddy grass roots.
He left his support, swam across the smaller channel, carefully, and secured the life preserver which had dropped into a heavy clump of the grass and then had floated free of the mud, held only by the end of a tangled string—and the skin of an empty, oilskin pouch, torn and ripped to tatters, that hung to the cord.
When Larry rejoined Jeff, he flung the life preserver into the space behind the control seat of the amphibian, leaving it there without comment as he helped Jeff to lift and drop the still unconscious man into his own forward place.
Then, pushing off in the rubber boat, he sat still, his dry clothes in a compact bundle in the boat thwarts, while Jeff let the wind and tide-run carry his amphibian out of the channel to where he could get sea space for a start, to get the amphibian pontoons “on the step” from which, with his silent cargo of human tragedy, Jeff lifted into air and went out of sight, southbound.
Sitting until he dried, Larry donned his garments.
“Gast—” he murmured. “Gast——”
Had he heard any name around the airports like Gaston?
“Well,” he reflected, “its something, now, anyway. We can look for a Frenchman—and learn if there’s one named Gaston.”
He sculled back to get under the shading, up-tilted wing of the seaplane, studying what he saw of its half submerged after place.
“Glory-gosh!” he exclaimed, staring.
There, neatly arranged, was the row of chewed bits of gum!
“Hello, boys!”
Sandy and Dick, standing by the airplane on the beach, whirled to see a short, stoutish man in regulation flying togs come unexpectedly into view from behind an inshore hillock of sand.
“As I live and breathe!” the man continued, “I’m seeing things!”
His gaze was bent on the aircraft.
Sandy discerned instantly that he was looking at the pilot who had handled the control job on the amphibian during the recent excitement.
The stranger had a pleasant, round face, with eyes that twinkled in spite of the creases around them that showed worry. No wonder he was worried, Sandy thought: having deserted the craft they had foiled in its attempt to get the gems, the man had returned from some short foray to discover his craft replaced by another.
“Howdy!” Dick greeted the stranger and replied to his exclamation. “No, sir, you’re not seeing things! At least you’re not if you mean the airplane near where the amphibian was——”
Sandy wanted to nudge his comrade, to warn him to be careful. There was no chance; the man was observing them intently.
“Amphibian? You know the different types, eh? May I ask if you belong around here, and if not, how you got here—and who took the ‘phib’?”
Unable to check Dick, his younger chum had to stand, listening while Dick related some of their most recent adventures.
“As I live and breathe! So you’re two of the lads who were in the other ‘crate’. Where’s the third—and was that Jeff with you? I thought it must be.”
“Superstitions and all!” chuckled Dick.
Dick judged the man to be both friendly and “all right,” from his pleasant, affable manner and his evident knowledge of their pilot’s identity.
Not so Sandy!
His mind leaped through a multitude of theories and of suspicions.
This man might be “in cahoots” with Jeff, and Sandy was determined not to take Jeff, or anyone else, at face value too readily.
The whole strange affair looked “queer” to him.
Jeff had falsified the true reason for the landing in the Everdail field. He might falsify other things—his real reason for flying out to the yacht. This man might be his partner in some hidden scheme. Even the Everdail Emeralds, Sandy decided, might be just “made up.”
“Nothing has been what it seemed to be,” he mentally determined. “I wish Dick would be careful what he says.”
Since Dick had already given the man a sidelight on Jeff’s character by mentioning his superstitions, it occurred to Sandy that he might learn, from the stranger’s reply, how well he knew Jeff.
His expression, as Sandy watched narrowly, became one of amusement, he smiled broadly, threw back his head and as he answered Dick’s phrase about superstitions and all, he laughed.
“He must have walked under a ladder, from the way things have turned out,” he said, amusedly.
“Who are you, please?” Sandy shot the question out suddenly.
“Me? Oh—” Did the man hesitate, Sandy wondered. It seemed to be so before he continued. “I’m Everdail.”