“Maybe it’s the one off the hydroplane,” Larry was dejected, but not convinced that the life preserver was a strange one to all.
“Not that!” the mate declared. “It’ud be markedScorpion. No, Mr. Everdail, this is no life preserver we’ve ever seen before.”
“Well, anyhow, I’m going to cut into it.”
“Please, sir, do that!” urged Sandy. “I can be sure it’s the one we found in the airplane fuselage, anyhow—I remember that little rusty stain in the cover.”
“Cut,” said Jeff, “but something tells me you’ll waste time.”
Sandy, Larry and Dick shook their heads, looking hopeful.
But Jeff was right!
From the rear of the crowd in the hangar, Pilot Larsen came forward.
“Who was in that boat?” he asked. “Could you recognize him?”
“The flares died just too soon,” Dick informed him. “Maybe Mr. Everdail saw more than we did.”
The millionaire shook his head.
“There’s one way to check up,” Jeff suggested. “Who’s not here who was in the house before the life preserver was missed?”
“You can learn nothing from that,” Miss Serena spoke up. “Too many are away.”
“We can get somewhere, anyhow,” Larry insisted. “Captain Parks, can you account for your men?”
“Yes, sir. Those who are not here are in the tender.”
“I saw them start to get back Mr. Everdail’s hydroplane,” Sandy nodded.
“The fellow who flew with you in the seaplane isn’t here,” remarked Larry, quietly, and, after a glance around, he said: “Neither is the yacht stewardess.”
“I sent her to her cabin,” Miss Serena stated. “She was greatly disturbed about this affair.”
“Oh!” said Larry, slowly, “she was?”
“Yes, but she is a high-strung girl,” argued the lady; and during the silence that followed, she turned to her relative.
“Atley,” she told the millionaire, “we are getting nowhere. For my part I believe that the emeralds have already been destroyed!”
“Destroyed!”
“Certainly. That seemed to be the purpose, in the London hotel. A person as clever as that must have planned this entire affair and has undoubtedly accomplished his wish and vanished long ago—or else he can never be caught because we have no way to discover him.”
“He ought to be caught and punished,” Jeff argued. “That-there set of emeralds was too precious for us to let somebody do a thing like this-here.”
“We know who was on the yacht,” Larry agreed with Jeff. “At least we can try to find out who threw the emeralds off.”
“We know,” Dick broke in. “Don’t you remember that Miss Serena recognized the maid—Mimi—by her uniform?”
“Then why don’t we go and question her?” Larry suggested. “Make her tell what she knows!” A murmur of assent broke out among the seamen who were naturally anxious to be cleared of any possible suspicion.
“Did you get an answer from Mrs. Everdail when you telegraphed her about Mimi?” asked Dick.
Mr. Everdail shook his head.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “I don’t believe Mimi is the one. She was with my wife during the last seven years and you get to know a person’s character in that time.”
“Just the same,” Larry insisted, “many respected bank tellers have been discovered for what they were after bank money disappeared.”
“As I live and breathe!” Mr. Everdail spoke gruffly, “I begin to wonder if you shouldn’t be the one to have ‘suspicious’ for a nickname. You have suspected Jeff, and me, and my friend who was with me, and Larsen, here, and his passenger—Captain Parks and now Mimi! It will be Miss Serena next!”
“My gracious!” that lady exclaimed, “I hope not!”
“I never will,” Dick declared.
“I guess I caught the disease from Sandy,” Larry was red-faced, “I admit I deserve the nickname now.”
“If Sandy doesn’t object to losing the nickname, then—” Mr. Everdail smiled a little teasingly.
“Oh, he’s welcome to it,” Sandy cried. “I’ve turned over a new leaf!”
“How’s that?” Jeff wanted to know.
“I used to take one little thing for a start, and make up my mind that whoever did it was the one I must suspect,” Sandy explained. “But that’s like trying to prove a man guilty becauseIthink he may be.”
“That’s so,” Dick began to chuckle. “Pinning clues onto folks is like the clothing salesman who tried to sell a white linen suit to a man who wanted a dark grey one. ‘I’ll give you what you want,’ the salesman said—and he went over and pulled down all the shades!”
“And that-there suit looked dark!” chuckled Jeff.
“Now I mean to listen, and watch, and not suspect anybody, as if I had a dark suit and a light one to sell and I’d wait to see who the different suits fitted!”
Breaking into a hearty laugh, Jeff slapped Sandy on the shoulder.
“That-there’s the ticket,” he said.
“By the way,” Captain Parks turned to his employer. “How about that cruise around New York to see the buildings lighted up that you told me to get the yacht ready for?”
“As I live and breathe!” Mr. Everdail slapped his thigh. “I forgot all about our birthday dinner and cruise for Sandy.”
“Well, the dinner was being got ready when you sent for us,” remarked the captain.
“A birthday dinner for me?”
“Meant for a surprise?” chimed in Dick.
“I’m starving,” laughed Larry.
“Then let’s go on board theTrampand see what the chef trots out.” Mr. Everdail led the way, inviting the others who had not originally been planned for.
“Thanks,” Larsen stated, “I’m too tired. Me for bed.”
“That’s right,” laughed Dick. “After a crack-up, always take a rest-up.”
“Now we’ll shelve this mystery.” Mr. Everdail led the way to the tender which would transfer them to the yacht for the evening run around illuminated Manhattan. “Eat, and have a good time, Sky Patrol.”
“We will, gladly, sir,” agreed Larry.
With the zest of healthy youth the chums “shelved” the mystery and hid their chagrin at being wrong again. The repast provided by the yacht chef was worth their attention. Especially palatable was the iced lemonade which the hot, humid night made very delightful.
“How do they get these ice-cubes the same tint as the lemonade?” Larry wondered, admiring the yellowish tone of the cubes, as he stirred the clinking mixture in his tall glass.
Dick grinned.
“Dye!” he chuckled. “If you want special food or drink you have to dye-it!”
“To diet!” Jeff caught the pun. “That-there’s a hot one!”
“It leaves me ‘cold’,” Larry came back at him. “But I’m interested about this ice.”
“Why?” asked Mr. Everdail, curiously.
“It’s simple enough,” the youngest member of the Sky Patrol broke in. “They pour some of the lemonade into the compartments in the ice-trays and freeze that. It is better than plain ice because it doesn’t weaken the lemonade at all.”
“That’s right,” Larry agreed. “Why, Mr. Everdail, I was only curious. I don’t know much about refrigerating plants and I didn’t think they could turn the ice any color they liked—but I see they can.”
He dropped the subject, finished his drink and, with the others, partook of a frozen sherbet also prepared in the yacht’s icing plant.
Finished, they were invited on deck to see the sights of Manhattan’s night sky, with its millions of electric bulbs, on signs and in high windows, and on skyscraper domes, painting a fairy picture against a dark heaven.
“What made you speak about the tinted ice?” Sandy asked, softly.
“Only what I explained,” Larry retorted. “I hadn’t thought about colored ice cubes, ever——”
“And aren’t you taking any hint from the yellow tones?” Sandy demanded.
“No! Why should I?”
“Don’t you, Dick?”
“Not a thing, Sandy. What’s in your mind?”
“Well—think! If they can freeze lemonade, and get yellow ice cubes, they can freeze lime juice—even something darker—and get——”
“Green cubes!” Larry broke in. “Yes—or freeze indigo and get blue ones. What of it?”
“What would dark green ice cubes conceal?”
Both chums stared at Sandy.
What would dark green ice cubes conceal?——
Suddenly Dick gripped his arm.
“Emeralds!” he almost shouted it, but dropped his voice instead.
“What better place could Captain Parks—or anyone else—find if he thought the life preserver idea might be too open?”
“But the chef would discover it—they couldn’t be left there!”
“Certainly they could.” Sandy was earnest. “If the Captain ordered that they be kept for his special use—and if he drank lime juice. Come on, let’s ask him.” They followed Sandy to the bridge.
“Captain,” Sandy asked, “what’s your favorite drink? Lemonade or——”
“I’m very fond of lime drinks——”
Sandy, elated and panting, turned to Mr. Everdail as Dick and Larry raced away.
“Come on, sir,” Sandy panted. “I’ll show you your emeralds!”
At Sandy’s sensational announcement there was a stampede from the bridge. Soon after Dick and Larry raced through the cluttered and deserted dining saloon, it was invaded by the captain, the millionaire, Miss Serena and others, with Sandy in the lead.
“What did you discover, Dick?”
At Sandy’s cry his chum, as well as the oldest Sky Patrol, turned.
“Nothing!” said Dick.
He made a disgusted gesture toward the open front of the refrigerating box, to the four ice cube trays lying empty on the galley floor.
“They were as empty as our heads!” Larry was dispirited.
“Sure they were!” the chef, who had observed their invasion of his cookery compartment with amazement, spoke up. “I had to use all of ’em to freeze the cubes for your dinner. No use to fill ’em again till I wash ’em up, so I left ’em out while I ‘defrost’ the box—cut off the current and let the box get warm enough to melt the frost that collects when you freeze a lot of cubes.”
He indicated the refrigerating unit which had heavy ice clinging wherever the chill had congealed the moisture from the evaporation of the water.
“Any other trays?” Mr. Everdail snapped.
“Only them, sir.” The chef threw all the compartments wide.
Food, ice-drip trays and vegetables in their dry-air receptacles, were all they discovered by a painstaking search. A glance into the “hydrator” packed with vegetables, crisp lettuce, long endive, and other varieties, a foray behind and under everything satisfied them that another clue had “gone West”—and left them very much out of favor.
No matter how closely they examined the built-in box, with its glossy enamel and bright, aluminum trays, nothing except food and drinkables in bottles revealed themselves.
And that ended it!
“I thought that was how it would turn out,” Jeff, coming from the after deck, declared.
“I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” the yacht owner grumbled. “I ought to have known better than to trust three young men under seventeen to solve such a mystery.”
He reflected for a moment and then spoke his final word.
“I think I shall land you at a Brooklyn wharf, boys, and let you go home.”
“See what Friday, the thirteenth, does for you?” Jeff said.
Neither of the chums had a word to answer.
“The date has nothing to do with it,” Mr. Everdail snapped. “It’s their lack of self-control and experience.” He turned and stalked out of the galley and after him, sorry for the three members of the disbanded Sky Patrol, Jeff moved.
“Sorry, buddies,” he said, shaking hands at the pier to which the yacht tied up briefly. “Don’t let it stand between your coming out to that-there new airport once in awhile to see me. I guess if Atley is through with you he’ll be done with my crate too, so maybe we’ll meet up one of these days soon. If we do, and I have the money for gas and oil, Larry, you get some more flying instruction. You may not be a crackerjack detective, but when it comes to handling that-there crate, you rate mighty good.”
He said a pleasant word to each of the other two, added a friendly clap on the arm and, with Mr. Everdail saying a brief, if not very angry farewell, the Sky Patrol quit its service, finished its air work and took to its feet.
Explanations at home accounted for the termination of their stay, which had been arranged by telephone at the beginning; and it seemed to them that the Everdail Emerald mystery was, as Dick dolefully said, “a closed book without any last pages.”
So despondent was Larry at his failure as a sleuth that he did not like to discuss their adventures with his chums.
His depression was more because his air training was over than from a real sense of failure. To Larry, one only failed when one failed to do his best—and that he had not failed in.
As a week went by Dick saw something to laugh about in their wild theories, their almost fantastic deductions. He found an old stenographers’ note book and jotted down, in ludicrous terms, the many clues and suspicious incidents they had encountered.
But Sandy was really glum.
To Sandy, the fault for their dismal failure lay at his own door.
“If I hadn’t gone off ‘half-cocked’,” he told his comrades, “maybe we would have seen something or somebody really worth following up.”
He made a vigorous mental resolve never to be caught in such a trap again.
That very afternoon he passed a news stand and was chained in his tracks by a small headline in black type at one corner of a paper, in a “box,” or enclosure of ruled lines that set it off from the other news.
“Take a look at this!” he hailed Larry as the latter sat on Dick’s porch, whittling on the tiny struts of a model airplane.
Both chums read the box he thrust under their eyes.
“Ghost Again Walks In Haunted Hangar.”
Under that heading the story reminded readers that the Everdail estate had been haunted several weeks before according to report.
The millionaire, it went on, coming East to meet his wife, returning on their yacht from Europe, had investigated the uncanny events reported to him by his caretaker and others.
He had learned nothing, the reporter had gleaned from the caretaker of the deserted estate.
However, it ended, as soon as Mr. Everdail had sailed on the yacht to join his wife at their lakeside camp in Maine, uncanny light, odd noises and other strange things had become evident again, as an excited local correspondent had notified the paper. Reporters, searching, and watching, had found nothing so far but the public would be informed as soon as they discovered the secret.
“What do you think of that?” Larry looked up.
“I don’t know what to think,” Dick admitted. “No ghost does those things. A real person has some reason for doing them. Who? And why?”
“The only way we’ll find out is by going there, at night, and watching,” Larry declared.
“Not for me,” Sandy said, surprising his chums. “We were ‘kicked out’ once. If we were to be caught on the place we’d be trespassers—and if the clever news reporters are watching and don’t find anything, how can we?”
“I’m going to be too busy earning money to finish my flying lessons to bother, anyway,” Larry decided.
“Still—” Dick began, and then, looking down the street, he became alert.
“Larry! Sandy! Look who’s coming. That’s the man who flew in the ‘phib’ with Mr. Everdail—the day the yacht came in!”
“It is!” agreed Larry. “He’s coming here. I wonder what for!”
“Hello, boys. Remember me?”
Dick rose to meet the man, tall, quiet, and with a smile of greeting on his face that belied the creases of worry around his eyes.
“I ought to,” Larry also advanced, rather sheepishly. “I tackled you the day you floated the dory out to the cracked-up seaplane.”
“Oh, no hard feelings, my friend,” the man shook hands. “You wrenched a shoulder that was already pretty painful—but you thought you had a jewel robber to deal with, so let’s let bygones sleep.”
He shook hands and accepted the lounging chair Dick offered.
“I don’t believe I’ve introduced myself,” the man began. “I’m Mr. Whiteside. Of course you wonder what I am here for.”
Naturally they did. Each nodded.
“I’ve kept pretty well in the background of this case,” he told them. “I am, by profession, an official of Mr. Everdail’s eastern enterprises. But I consider myself something of an amateur detective ‘on the side’ and I want you three to help me.”
“But Mr. Everdail ‘discharged’ us.” There was no resentment, only remonstrance, in Larry’s quiet remark.
“Oh, I know it. I have seen him, been up in Maine. But he has given me a free hand, and I think you three can be useful. You see, I want that hangar watched, now that the reporters have gone away. I can’t be there day and night—I know,” he broke off to explain, “that you three have suspected me of having something to do with the wrong side of the affair, and naturally enough. I came upon Larry unawares, at the seaplane. I accepted his offer about surrendering jewels and actually had a gun in my hand at the time. No wonder I fall in line as—well, as a suspected person. I don’t hold that against you. As it happens, I am trying to recover the missing jewels, just because I made such a failure of rescuing them before.”
That might, or might not be true, Sandy reflected; but he maintained a careful guard over expression and speech.
“We aren’t doing anything about the mystery,” stated Sandy, wondering if that might be the plan—that this man had come to try to pump news out of them. If so, Sandy was determined that as long as they had given up, been given up, it did not matter if the man knew it or not.
“But you will do something! To help me out?”
“What?” Dick asked, with a mental reservation as to any promise.
“Why, go out to the Everdail estate, under my direction, and watch.”
“We’d be trespassers,” argued Sandy. “We might be arrested.”
“I can arrange all that.”
Mr. Whiteside turned directly to Larry.
“I need you for something else,” he said. “Atley Everdail isn’t here to help, if any situation developed where I would need a pilot. I have a theory that makes me think I shall need one——”
“What about Tommy Larsen?”
The man who had piloted the cracked-up seaplane was again able to fly, he responded, but was not safe for a long flight. Besides, the detective argued, he wanted someone who had proved himself trustworthy in more things than flying.
“I’ve had only about nine hours instruction,” Larry said honestly. “I wouldn’t like to risk soloing on that. I can taxi, handle the ’plane to get into the wind, take off and fly level, bank, turn, circle, spiral, climb, shoot the field and set down. But——”
“That is all settled in advance,” Mr. Whiteside stated. “Tommy Larsen is ‘kicking around’ without a job. I’ve got his consent to finish your instruction, and put you in trim for a license by the end of Summer.”
Sandy, watching his friend’s face take on an eager light, a look of longing, decided that Mr. Whiteside could not have found a more certain way to fascinate Larry and enlist his cooperation.
Dick, too, showed an interested face.
“That would be great!” Larry declared. Then he became more serious, adding. “Finishing up my course would be fine, but if it means that I’d have to do anything against Mr. Everdail’s wishes, after he told us——”
“He wishes to recover those emeralds, my boy.”
“But he has agreed with Miss Serena that they are destroyed,” Dick objected.
“And I think they are not destroyed!”
He gave them his theory.
“When Everdail gave me all the facts he had about the London attempt to ruin the emeralds, the first idea I had was that some independent robber had failed to find the real gems and, in spite, had damaged the imitations.”
“But no other jewels were taken!”
That supported his decision that neither a single robber nor a band of miscreants had planned the affair. They would have taken all the real stones, and he believed that these were numerous.
“I weighed the situation,” went on the detective. “A robber would be enough of a gem expert to know the stones were imitations and would have taken the others. But—some Hindu fanatic, in India, where the emeralds came from originally, might have a fixed idea that they must be destroyed. He might not know imitations from real ones.”
“That would explain why acid was put on them,” agreed Dick. “It wouldn’t explain any other attempts, though.”
“No! I argued that as soon as a Hindu accomplished the entry to the hotel and believed he had destroyed the stones, he would stop.”
“Then why did you and Mr. Everdail fly out to meet the yacht?”
“We wanted to take every precaution, Larry. There was a chance that no Hindu was involved. It might be someone with what the French call anidee fixee—a fixed notion—a demented purpose of destroying emeralds—no other stones were treated with acid except those lying in the little pool around the emeralds.”
“Are there people as crazy as that? And going around, loose?”
“Once in awhile you hear of such people, Dick.”
“Well, wouldn’t anybody in England give up then?” asked Larry.
“Anybody who remained in England would have to—he’d be left there. But—” Mr. Whiteside leaned forward and spoke meaningly, “—a man sailed from England—and although I did not know it at the time, I have checked up, since, and the man from London is an English circus acrobat—who went in for ‘stunting’ on airplanes.”
“The man who claimed to be a secret agent of a London insurance firm?” asked Dick, amazed.
“The firm sent no investigator!”
“Then we have found the man who is guilty!” exclaimed Dick. “He was with Tommy Larsen, hired him to go out to meet the yacht!”
“That seems to be the fact,” Mr. Whiteside admitted. “Before the arrival of the yacht I had no inkling that this fellow had come over; but Mrs. Everdail was so nervous and worried, we decided to fly out to meet the yacht, just as Jeff, who had been retained before Everdail found me, decided to do.”
Sandy had made no contribution to the discussion.
He spoke, at last, quietly.
“I said, early in the adventure, that nothing was what it seemed to be,” Sandy remarked. “This backs me up. But——”
“But—what?”
“Look at this, Mr. Whiteside—we are sure he made a try for the emeralds in the seaplane he hired. He thought they were destroyed—at least he had done all he could to destroy them. Then—why did he make another try?”
“Maybe he wasn’t sure he’d done what he intended,” argued Dick.
“He had ruined them! Wasn’t that enough?”
“My idea is that he learned—there was an accomplice on the yacht——”
“Mimi?”
“Perhaps! He must have learned that the real gems were not ruined at all,” Mr. Whiteside explained.
“Do you think his confederate threw the real ones overboard, in the life preserver, with the ruined imitations tied to it?”
Turning to answer Larry, the detective hesitated.
“That doesn’t check up,” he said. “The confederate—Mimi—knew the imitations! She wouldn’t throw them at all. If she knew the real ones were hidden in that life belt she’d have flung that. But we know that the imitations went overside and were in the gum—as Sandy cleverly discovered. So—that makes it all muddled up again!”
“I don’t understand how the haunted hangar comes in,” protested Larry.
“That’s what I want to discover. It does come in—I’m sure of that! You, and Dick and Sandy, can help, I believe. Two to watch the hangar, taking turns, and with my aid whenever I can manage it. You, Larry, to perfect your flying technique and be ready if I need you.”
“It sounds good to me!” urged Larry, turning to his chums.
“Well, I say, let’s reorganize,” Dick had a twinkle in his eye. “You, Larry, will be the sole member of the Sky Patrol—and Sandy and I will be—er—the ‘ground crew’!”
“That’s a good description,” the detective chuckled.
“All right,” agreed Sandy. “Dick, you and I are the ground crew. As soon as you’re ready, Mr. Whiteside, we’ll take hold!”
Taking hold, for the “ground crew,” required some argument with parents. Mr. Whiteside seemed to have some magical way of overcoming objections to possible night activity, however; and the next morning found the two reinstated assistants riding with Mr. Whiteside on a ’bus bound for the town nearest to the old Everdail estate.
Their morning work consisted of investigating the hangar, outside and inside.
The caretaker raised no objections. He seemed entirely satisfied that Mr. Whiteside was exactly what he claimed to be, and so Dick, who had held some misgivings, accepted the man as a detective and worked with a will to discover some clue to the means used by the “ghost” for getting in and out of the hangar.
In that the trio failed, and had to give up until night would let them return and establish a keen guard over the haunted structure.
Larry fared much better.
He found Tommy Larsen much improved in health, with his nerves again steady.
“I don’t feel uneasy about short hops,” the pilot informed him. “I don’t think I’d want to take a long control job just yet, though. Now let’s see what Jeff put into you. Before I go up with you, tell me what you’d do if you were really starting off alone.”
“First of all,” Larry said, “I’d go over to the weather display board, to see what the flying conditions would be.”
“You did learn!” Tommy was pleased. “Yep! That’s important. Then——”
“I’d notice the windsock, while I’d go to my crate. If it wasn’t already running, I’d start the engine—being sure to repeat every syllable of the ‘mech’s’ words when he turned the prop.”
“You wouldn’t want any mistake on your part to have the juice on when he swung that prop to suck in the charge—good!”
“Of course, if the airplane was on a cement apron in front of the hangar, it would be all right to start the engine there. But in sandy ground, or on a dusty apron, I’d be sure the tail wasn’t pointed so the propeller blast would throw dust on ’planes or on people.”
Pilot Tommy Larsen nodded vigorously.
“Don’t intend to be a dusting pilot, do you?”
“No, sir. Then I’d warm up the engine—by granny-golly-gracious! I forgot something——”
“What?”
“Well, unless I’d seen him do it, before even the engine was started, I’d want to be sure the ‘rigger’ of my crew would go over the crate and wipe it with a soft rag, so any frayed wires would be noticed—and I’d want to be sure he had inspected the ’plane either when it landed last or before I’d take off.”
“Jeff was a good teacher, I see. Go ahead.”
Larry went through the explanation of his method of taxiing, with the elevators up enough to keep the tail on the ground as he used the throttle to regulate speed, and the ailerons to govern the wings and keep them from being tipped up or down by wind or uneven ground, as well as his idea of using the rudder to hold the ship on its straight travel to the point of take-off and how he would turn.
“All right! If you know all that about getting set, you might as well let me see you do it!” Thus Larry began his tenth hour of instruction.
That completed, and with a quiet compliment for the way he had made his final check of the engine and instruments while the chocks were still under the wheels, with a word of advice about not trying to lift the ship off the ground in a cross-wind until a safe margin of speed was assured, Larsen bade him return that afternoon. Larry, pleased, went to his lunch, turning over in his mind the many things he had done, to see if he had done any of them in the wrong way.
“I corrected the tendency of the wind to turn the crate as we taxied, and I lifted her off and leveled for a couple of seconds so that the prop could bring back flying speed before climbing.”
He had also chosen a moderate climbing angle, keeping a watch for any incoming craft as he went higher before banking and turning.
“I remembered to return the controls to neutral when I had the ship flying just the way I wanted it to,” he mused. “And I didn’t over-control. Maybe—maybe it won’t be long before Tommy will let me solo.” It wasn’t!
At three that afternoon Larsen informed him that he was to take up the dual-control craft they had hired from a flying friend of the pilot’s at Roosevelt Field the second, on Long Island.
“All right—thank you. I’ll keep cool—and do my best.”
He walked to the airplane, standing before its hangar, determined to use the after seat, as did most pilots flying alone in a dual machine, and turned to Tommy inquiringly.
“Where’s the sack of sand?”
“Did you think of that?”
“Yes, sir. If I am in the front and you are in the other place, and the airplane balances and flies easily, there must be something to make up the difference when you aren’t along!”
“Bud—you’ll get along!”
And when the sack had provided stability in the front place, Larry, feeling a little anxious, but more about making mistakes under the pilot’s watchful eye in starting than about his performance in the air, got the engine started, warmed up, checked, put the craft into the wind, signaled for chocks to be pulled away, gave a spurt of the “gun” to start it, accelerated speed till the ship began to want to take the air itself, having remembered to use the elevators to lift the tail skid free from dragging—and with a return of elevators to normal right away to keep the craft level on its run—he drew back on the stick, widened the throttle feed a trifle, returned the elevators to normal as he attained the safe climbing angle, and was up and away on his first solo flight.
In his whole life he had never felt such a sense of elation!
The whole fifteen minutes that he stayed up were like moments of freedom—alone, master of his craft, able to control it as he would—there is not, in the whole world, another sensation to equal that of the first solo flight of a youthful pilot who combines confidence in himself with knowledge of his ’plane and how it responds.
The heavens were his!
No bird ever was more free.
And when he made his landing, perfectly setting down on wheels and tail-skid as Jeff had taught him, “I wish all my pupils were like him,” said a flying instructor who had been watching. Larry, doffing his tight “crash” helmet, overheard.
It was the most cherished compliment he could wish.
And that marked the beginning of ten days of flying, sometimes with Tommy to give him the evolutions of recovering from side-slips, skids, tail spins, and other possibilities of flying, none of them hazards at sensible altitude, and with a calm mind guiding the controls. At other times “stunts” were taught, not to make him a daredevil, but because, in flying, an airplane sometimes gets into positions where the pilot must know every possible means of extricating it. Solo, and with Tommy, Larry became a good pilot.
And in all that time, his “ground crew”—got nowhere!
“Hooray!” Dick slapped Sandy’s shoulder. “The ‘man higher up’ has come down to earth! Here comes Larry!”
“You’re a sight for sore eyes!” Sandy exclaimed as the youthful amateur pilot joined his friends.
“I haven’t seen much of you, I know.” Larry sat down on the swing by Dick on the latter’s veranda. “Daytimes I’ve been studying rigging and checking up on an airplane, because Tommy thinks a pilot ought to know everything there is to know about his ship because he may have to do things himself if he gets hold of a careless rigger.”
“If the pilot didn’t know the right way he couldn’t say if his helper was doing things the wrong way,” agreed Sandy.
“But that hasn’t kept you away evenings,” objected Dick.
“Tommy has been very good to me, giving me his time, in his room, so he could tell me all the ‘fine points’ he has picked up about flying.”
“Sky Patrol’s report received, considered and accepted,” Dick stated.
“Now for yours,” Larry smiled. “What has the Ground Crew done?”
“Watched, evenings, turn and turn about, till midnight,” Dick told him. “Mr. Whiteside took the day shift and came on to relieve us every midnight.”
“What progress have you made?”
“None at all!”
Sandy, responding to Larry, added:
“But you wouldn’t expect anything to happen if you’d seen all the reporters who have been ‘hanging around’ the old estate. Why, one has slept in that hangar a couple of nights.”
“No ghost with any self-respect would make a show of himself for newspaper publicity!” Dick chuckled.
“Almost all we needed to do was to watch the reporters,” Sandy said. “But they have given up, I guess. There was only one out last night, and he told me he thought the paper that ran that ‘box’ had played a trick on the others and on the readers.”
“That’s good,” Larry remarked. “Now the coast will be clear, the ghost can walk, and I will be with my trusty comrades to trip him up.”
“It seems queer to me,” Dick spoke. “I’ve thought a lot about it. The fellow who played ghost must be searching for something. What can it be?”
“The emeralds?”
“But he was there before they were lost, Dick,” Larry objected.
“That’s so, Larry.”
“Here’s something that just came to me.” Sandy bent forward in the lounging chair. “Nothing has happened at night, for ten days. But all that time, Mr. Whiteside has been on the ‘day watch,’ as he calls it.”
“Golly-gracious!” Larry exclaimed. “Do you think?——”
“When Jeff flew us there, the first time, there seemed to be somebody in that hangar when we started in,” Dick added to Sandy’s idea.
“You’re right,” Sandy admitted. “By the way, Jeff is back at Bennett Field, taking up passengers for hire again.”
“I’m not worrying about Jeff.” Larry was caught by the suspicious action of their “detective” in taking the day watch while nothing occurred at night.
“What do you think of going out there to the hangar now?” he asked.
They thought very well of the idea.
It was close to noon when the ’bus deposited them at the town from which they had to walk to the estate.
Strolling down the quiet street toward the main highway, Sandy’s alert eyes, always roving, caught sight of the estate caretaker. They hailed him and ran to the corner where he had turned to wave to them.
He greeted them sourly. Plainly the caretaker was out of sorts.
“Humph!” he grunted. “More dern amachoor detectives!”
“What makes you say that?” Sandy’s grin of salutation changed to a look of hurt surprise.
“Why wouldn’t I say it? Ain’t it enough I had reporters an’ all rampagin’ through the place without you three got to come, on top o’ that Whiteside feller and Jeff——”
“Mr. Whiteside—and Jeff?” repeated Larry.
“Yep! Nights it’s been bad enough—now it’s daytimes! Ghosts! Reporters! Snoopers! And now you fellers in the daytime!”
“What about Mr. Whiteside—and Jeff?” Dick wanted to get to the bottom of a startling situation.
“Well, if you must know—that Whiteside feller was there, as per usual, and along come Jeff, limpin’——”