“Limping? Was he hurt?”
“Had his foot tied up, Master Larry. Said he was flyin’ and his power quit and he had to come down in a bad spot and a lot more.”
Once started on his troubles and their cause, the caretaker needed no more prompting. Jeff, he went on, had met Mr. Whiteside and said that if he wanted to fly he’d have to go in that other thing that they put in the water——”
“The hydroplane boat?” Sandy broke in to ask.
“No, the ampibbian——”
“The amphibian!”
The man nodded as they walked down toward the highway. After he helped the others to get the water-and-land ’plane onto the field, he grumbled, and had turned the propeller blades till his arms ached, the superstitious pilot, saying he had stumbled and fallen that morning and knew something would go wrong, had decided that they had no time to repair or find the trouble in the amphibian.
They must get going, he reported that Mr. Whiteside had declared, and Jeff had argued that if he had a six-B slotted bolt, he could fix his motor.
“I never did hear of a six-B slotted bolt—or any slotted bolt,” declared Dick, while Sandy and Larry assented.
“Neither did the hardware man here in town after that Whiteside feller gave me five dollars to walk in the four miles and—back!”
Dick consulted his comrades with his eyes.
“That sounds to me like sending a new machine shop hand to the foreman for a left-handed monkey wrench,” he chuckled. “They’ve played a joke——”
“That doesn’t fit in,” argued Larry. “A bandaged foot, a limping pilot, an engine that wouldn’t start—and sending this gentleman on an errand that would take him away for a good while——”
“Where did Jeff say he set down?”
The caretaker turned and scowled at Sandy.
“He never set down nowhere. He leaned against the hangar!”
“I mean—where is his own airplane?”
“He never told me.”
All three comrades wished heartily that Jeff had revealed the information. Since he had not, each cudgeled his brains for some likely place within walking distance of the estate.
“That ‘six-B slotted bolt’ makes me think his engine hasn’t anything wrong with it at all,” Larry stated, finally. “Furthermore, I think he put down his crate in some handy—good—spot!”
“A crackerjack pilot like Jeff could get in on a pretty small field,” Larry argued. “One place I can think of that isn’t a bad landing spot is the fairway of the ninth hole on that golf course yonder.” He indicated the grounds of a golf club. “It’s away from everything, and he might fly over the course, see that no foursome or twosome was likely to get there for some time—” Dick nodded, agreeing; but Sandy shook his head.
“What bothers me,” he stated, “is that if his engine is all right, Mr. Whiteside would have met him and gone in Jeff’s ship.”
“Unless—unless they wanted to make a water landing!”
“Golly-gracious, Dick! I think you’ve found the reason——”
“But, Larry—why wouldn’t they use the hydroplane boat?” Sandy was not convinced.
“I think the amphibian would be quicker—and maybe they don’t want to land but need the pontoons in case of——”
Dick, laying a hand on Larry’s arm, stopped him.
“I have guessed the answer,” he cried. “They wanted to get rid of this gentleman,” he nodded toward the caretaker. “Then they could search that hangar——”
But they, themselves, had done that thoroughly! Larry made the objection but Dick waved a hand to dismiss it.
“The ghost hadn’t found anything. We hadn’t!” he argued. “Maybe they’ve decided there is something—and if it isn’t there when they make a good search, they think they know where else to look—and it’s either in the water—or over the water—or——”
“In the swamp where the seaplane crashed!” shouted Sandy, complimenting Dick with a sound smack on his back.
“Then let’s look on that fairway and see if the airplane is there, and if the engine runs.”
The airplane was there. The engine operated readily.
While they discussed these proofs of Dick’s quick wit, the sound of an airplane engine turned all eyes skyward.
“It’s the ‘phib’!” Sandy exclaimed.
“Come on—get in!” Larry urged. “I can fly this crate—and we’ll see what they’re going to do!”
If he never did so again, Sandy lived up to his decision to turn over a new leaf for once.
Usually impulsive, generally quick to adopt any new suspicion, he surprised his chums by catching Larry by the coat and dragging him back to the ground as his foot rested on the wing-step bracing.
“No!” he cried. “No! Larry—Dick—you, Mister! Come on, quick—under these trees yonder!”
They stared at him.
“Don’t you understand?” he urged. “Jeff will fly over his crate to see if it’s all right. He may see us. Come on!”
So sound was his argument that the others hurried with him to the concealment of the nearby grove, after Larry had thoughtfully cut out the ignition so that the propeller would not revolve if its observers flew low enough to distinguish its position.
Well hidden, they learned how wise Sandy had been.
Coming closer as it dropped lower, the amphibian circled in a tight swing over the fairway several times and finally straightened out, flying toward the wind that came from almost due North on this first cool day after a humid July week, and began to grow smaller to the watchers.
“We’d better get that engine started, now.” Dick left the grove.
“Let’s be careful,” commented Sandy. “They may come back.”
“We can be warming it up and watching!” Larry urged.
“We don’t need to hurry,” Sandy insisted. “I think I know—at last!—what this all means.”
Three voices, that of the caretaker no longer grumpy, urged him to explain. Too earnest to be proud of his deductions, Sandy spoke.
“When the hangar was first haunted, and we found chewing gum that the ghost had put there, as we thought,” he told an interested trio, “none of us could work out any answer to the puzzle.
“But stop and think of these things,” he continued, urging his two friends to use their own imaginations. “The amphibian was old-looking and didn’t seem to be much good, and the gas gauge was broken, and the chewing gum was quite fresh. That might look as though——”
“Some pilot was getting the ‘phib’ ready to fly and chewed gum as he worked and put the gauge out of order to keep anybody from knowing he had filled the gas tanks.”
“Good guess, Larry! It’s the way I work it out,” Dick added.
“Go on, young feller.” The caretaker was absorbed.
“Well,” Sandy grinned, “the chewing gum disappeared! Supposing the fellow we thought we saw vanishing really was there and got out some way. He’d know, from Jeff landing us and our going in, that the amphibian might not be usable when he’d need it——”
“So he went back and got the gum—but why?”
“He was getting that ready, Dick, for the emeralds—remember how Sandy discovered the place the imitations were hidden?”
“That’s so, Larry. Go on, Sandy. You’ve got a brilliant brain!”
“Oh, no,” Sandy protested. “It just flashed over me—putting all the facts together, the way I made up my mind I’d do.”
He outlined the rest of his inference.
“That was proved—the seaplane coming out to the yacht proved that the passenger who said he was a London agent, and wasn’t at all, had changed his plans. Well, say that he had arranged with Mimi, Mrs. Everdail’s maid, to have her throw over the jewels——”
“But she wouldn’t make the mistake of giving a confederate the wrong ones. She’d seen the real ones.”
They were working on the check-up and warming of the engine as they talked. Dick made the objection to Sandy’s theory.
“She’d know that the man knew the difference too!” Larry added.
That could be true, Sandy admitted. But he argued that the girl must have seen the captain take the stern life preserver to his cabin, and might have guessed, even observed through a cabin port, what he did. In that case she would have thrown over the life preserver knowing that her confederate would put it in the seaplane. And he had done exactly that!
“But the passenger jumped with a different life preserver!” Dick was more anxious to prove every step of Sandy’s argument than to find flaws in it.
“I think we found the life preserver that they might have had on board the seaplane all the time. And the other one—we never thought of the yacht’s name being painted on its own things. So we took it for granted that we had the real hiding place.”
“You argue real good, young feller.”
“Thank you, sir. Well, if that was true—and if it wasn’t—why is the ghost walking again in the very hangar that the seaplane wreckage is in?”
That was a clinching statement.
“You’re right. And the passenger, who has been out of sight, has been haunting the hangar, trying to find the other life belt,” Larry took up the theory. “Mr. Whiteside must have guessed that, too, and he planned today to make a good search and if he didn’t find what he wanted——”
“He’d fly over that swamp and see if the other belt had fallen out of the seaplane—and he’d need a pilot—so he got Jeff!” Dick put the finishing touch to the revelation. “Larry kept Tommy busy, so Mr. Whiteside got Jeff.”
“Then we ought to be flying—the engine wasn’t very cold—it’s safe to hop.” Larry took a step toward the airplane.
“I still claim we needn’t hurry,” Sandy argued. “If we go too soon, they will be sure to see us and give up.”
“But they may find the life preserver if it’s still there and get away with the emeralds.”
“If it’s still there, Larry, it will take some hunting. Anyway, we almost know their plans. If they don’t find anything they will come back to the hangar with the crate. If they do——”
“They may go anywhere,” Dick declared.
“Well, I don’t say not to follow them. But I do say let’s take our time. Isn’t there some way we can work out so they won’t be likely to discover us?”
Larry stared. Then he nodded and grew very thoughtful.
At last he delivered a suggestion that met unanimous approval.
The airplane, with a more powerful engine and better flying qualities, could go higher than the amphibian which was both slower and more clumsy. To that argument he added the information that if the binoculars they had first used were still where Dick had put them, in the airplane pocket, they could find the ship’s “ceiling”—the highest point to which power would take it and the air could still sustain it at flying speed—and from that height, in one look downward discover the truth or falsity of their theory.
“If the ‘phib’ is flying low over the marsh, we can go off as far as we can and still see it,” he finished. “Then if they fly back to the hangar, we can outfly them on a different side of the island and get here in time to leave Jeff’s crate while we go and see what they do. They won’t suspect that we’re near, and if the caretaker goes with us as a witness to check up our story and to help balance the fourth seat, we can either come back if they do or follow them if they go somewhere else.”
Within half an hour, high in air, the airplane found its quarry!
With a cry of delight, unheard in the engine drone, Dick took the powerful glasses from his eyes, passed them to Sandy and then rubbed his hands vigorously to rid them of the chill of the high altitude.
Sandy had only to take one look when he located the object of their flight, to know that his deductions had all been sound.
Close to the grassy, channel-divided marsh, flying in a sort of spiral to cover every bit of ground, the amphibian was moving.
Sandy generously recollected the caretaker and sent back the glass.
Larry, informed by Sandy’s gesture of the discovery, nodded, took a second to jam his cap tighter, glad that it fitted so close that it could partly save his hair from the blasting, pulling wind—he had no helmet!—banked and leveled off into a course that would take them straight away from the locality.
“I don’t want them to catch us cruising,” he murmured to himself.
After a short flight he came around in a wide swing, so that the airplane was over the Sound and then crossed the marsh again from that direction.
The report he got was that the amphibian was still flying.
But the next approach told a new development.
The ’plane beneath them had set down!
That caused Larry to determine to circle over the place. They had found something, perhaps, down below!
When Sandy waved in an excited gesture, twenty minutes later, and Larry’s keen eyes saw the amphibian, a tiny dot, moving over the Sound, he felt sure that the missing life preserver had been found.
Taking a quick glance at gas gauge, altimeter, tachometer and his other instruments, he nodded.
“All right,” he told himself. “We’ll follow them and see what they do and where they go.”
On high wings the pursuit began.
Judged by the theory they had worked out, the action of the men in the amphibian indicated that they were flying away with something they had found.
“If they had given up, so soon,” Dick mused, holding his head low to avoid the icy blast of their high position, “if they’d given up Jeff would go straight to the hangar again. But they’re going across Long Island Sound toward Connecticut, just as the unknown person in the hydroplane boat did with the other life preserver.”
Larry, holding speed at a safe flying margin so that the sustentation, or lifting power of the air, was greater than the drag of the airplane as it resisted the airflow, let the nose drop a trifle, let the engine rev down as he glided to a lower level where the air would not bite so much. They would be able to follow quite as well, dropping behind just enough to keep the line of distance between them as great as if they were higher and closer over the amphibian.
With his glasses, Dick could observe and indicate any change of direction or any other maneuver.
They had devised a hastily planned code of signals, very much like those used by a flying school instructor giving orders to a pupil where the Gossport helmet was not worn.
Dick, watchful and alert, lowered his chilled glasses and Sandy, keeping watch, saw his right arm extend straight out from his shoulder, laterally to the airplane’s course.
Sandy repeated the gesture after attracting Larry’s attention by a slight shaking of the dual-control rudder which was still attached, but which, on any other occasion, he had been careful not to touch.
“Left arm extended! Turn that way!” Larry murmured.
Gently he moved the stick to lower the left aileron, bringing up the right one, of course, by their mutual operation; rudder went left a trifle and in a safe, forty-five degree bank, he began to turn.
Almost instantly Dick again removed the chilly glasses, stuck his arm out ahead of him with his forearm and hand elevated, and motioned forward with the wrist and hand.
The signal was relayed by Sandy.
“Resume straight flight.”
Larry, getting the message correctly, reversed control, brought the airplane back to straight, level position on the new angle, and held it steady, revving up his engine and lifting the nose in a climb as Sandy gave him Dick’s sign, hand pointed straight upward, to climb.
“What in the world are they going to do?” he wondered.
“Have they discovered us?” Dick pondered the possibility.
“I can’t guess this one,” Sandy muttered. “They started to turn one way, then went on only a little off the old course, and now they’re coming up toward where we are.”
The problem was not answered, either by the continued gain in elevation or by the later change of plan.
“They’re gliding!”
Dick, as he made the exclamation, gestured with his arm toward the earth.
To Sandy’s signal Larry cut the gun, keeping the throttle open just enough to be sure the engine, in that chill air, would not stall, and with stick sent forward and then returned to neutral, imitated the gentle glide of the amphibian.
What it meant none of the three knew any better than did the half frozen caretaker who wished very sincerely that he had never come.
“Sandy! Sandy!” Dick cried as loudly as he could. “They’ve done a sharp turn—they’re going back home I think!”
Larry did not need to have the intricate signal relayed, nor did he wait to be told his passengers’ deduction. Their own maneuvers had given him a clue.
With the first change of direction and the following indecision that showed in the amphibian’s shifts of direction, Larry spelled a change of plan on the part of its occupants. The resulting glide, enabling his chums to speak above the idling noise of the engine, indicated a similar possibility in the other ship—Jeff and Mr. Whiteside were talking over plans.
He rightly decided that they had recalled sending the caretaker on a foolish errand. They must get back and make some explanation or he would suspect them, perhaps report to somebody else. They could not know that he was shivering, crouched down in the last place of Jeff’s own airplane.
Now for a race, Larry muttered, almost automatically moving the throttle wider as he prepared to alter their course.
It came to him, swiftly, that this would be both a race and a complication.
Not only must they get the airplane back to the golf course and set it down and have its engine still, themselves being hidden before Jeff flew over it. Furthermore, they must get to the hangar and be somewhere near the field when Jeff brought home the amphibian—or they would never know whether he and his companion had found anything or not.
Larry had to do a little rapid mental arithmetic.
To avoid being sighted and identified when passing the amphibian, the airplane must cut inland instead of making a beeline for the golf course.
“That would make the return to their objective form a rough letter “L” in the air.
However, at the far end of its flight the amphibian must turn inland a similar distance to fly over the golf fairway. That made the flying problem one of speed and not of distance traveled.
The airplane, selected for its wing-camber and span that gave it a low landing speed and good sustentation, was not fast.
The amphibian was even more slow.
“Distance to cover, seventy miles,” Larry pondered. “Our best speed, Jeff said, once, was about seventy miles an hour. The ‘phib’ does sixty, top.”
He made his calculation.
“No leeway to get to the hangar—Sandy might, barely, because he was on the track team, last school term. That is our only chance. But, at that, it will be ‘nip-and-tuck’!”
No air race can give the thrill of other forms of speed competition as does the horse race, the motor boat or sailing race, the track meet or the automobile speedway contests.
The distance is too great to permit spectators to observe it, the ships scatter, seek different elevations, or in other ways fail to keep that close formation which makes of the hundred-yard dash such a blood-stimulating incident.
The automobile contest generally follows a course where watchers have vantage points for gathering.
The sailboats or motor craft can be accompanied or seen through marine glasses.
To air pilots, of course, there is plenty of excitement.
It is their skill, their ability to take advantage of every bit of tailwind, their power to get the utmost of safe “go” out of engine, wings and tail assembly, that keeps them alert and decides the outcome.
So it was in Larry’s race, with Dick, Sandy and the caretaker.
It could not be watched or followed; but to the occupants of the ship it was a thrilling competition with the mystery element adding zest; and when, with a fair tailwind aiding him, Larry shot the improvised “field” of the ninth fairway, making sure at cost of one complete circuit that no one was there, playing, the thrill for them was not over.
Sandy caught Larry’s idea even before the airplane had taxied to its place, close to the original take-off.
“I’m off!” cried Sandy, coat flung aside, collar ripped away, as he leaped fleetly along the soft turf. Not waiting to observe his progress, Dick and Larry busied themselves getting the airplane tail around into the same position it had originally occupied.
The engine had long before been stopped.
From the air, to an observer who had no idea that his craft had been used, all should seem natural, Larry decided as he and Dick, with Sandy’s discarded garments, and with the caretaker ruefully grumbling, chose a place of concealment.
Already the drone of the amphibian came from the shore side of the field, and in a low, quick swing, followed by a zooming departure, Jeff and Mr. Whiteside passed overhead.
“Now,” Larry remarked, “it’s up to Sandy.”
“Yep!” Dick agreed. “And it will be a close thing for him.”
“If he does!” grunted the caretaker.
For the answer they had to wait till dark.
Although he was the central figure in an unusual situation, Sandy was more puzzled than enlightened by its surprising development.
A footrace against a flying ship was novel enough; but the maneuver of the amphibian was still more strange. It was baffling to Sandy.
Sandy gave up the race very quickly.
Hearing the approach of an aircraft he sought concealment under roadside trees, continuing his steady trot. His heart sank as he identified the amphibian making its swinging oval from water to land and around the fairway and back.
“I can’t make it,” Sandy slowed. “It’s all off!”
He knew that it was safe for him to leave his shelter. The “phib” was past him in its zooming return from the golf course.
“Now we’ll never know what they found, or if they found anything in the swamp,” he told himself dejectedly.
Then his attention was fixed and his mind became mystified.
“That’s their crate, all righty,” he muttered. “But—they’re not landing on the estate. I suppose they’ve come to see that Jeff’s ’plane was safe. Now they’ll go on to Connecticut and we are defeated.”
He came out onto the road, walking with bent head as soon as he had caught his breath again.
For a moody few minutes he considered the wisdom of rejoining his chums.
“No,” he decided. “When I don’t join them they’ll come over to the estate. It might be a good idea to go on to the landing field and see if the amphibian dropped off anything with a small parachute.”
He pursued his way without haste. While he had been divesting himself of his coat Larry had urged the caretaker to go on to his duties.
“I’ll go on!” Sandy murmured more cheerfully. “I’ll have a clear half hour to myself. Maybe—without anybody talking and disturbing me—I might think out some answer to all the queer things that have happened.”
The failure of the amphibian to return to its home field he disposed of by deciding that its pilot meant to take something to some rendezvous in Connecticut, the one, no doubt, the hydroplane boat had made for.
The thing that came into his mind and stuck there, offering neither explanations nor a solution was the mystery of how that man had disappeared out of the hangar on their first visit.
“I’d like to find out how the ‘ghost’ gets in and out again,” he reflected.
Deep in the problem he looked up at a sound.
To his surprise, astonishing him so much that he stopped in the middle of a stride, the lodgekeeper’s gate of an estate he was passing opened suddenly and Sandy found himself staring at the last person in the world he expected to meet.
Facing him with a grin was Jeff!
“Hello, buddy,” the pilot said, without any show of dismay.
“Why—uh—hello, Jeff!”
“On your way to solve that-there spook business?”
“I—” Sandy made up his mind to see if he could startle Jeff into a change of expression and changed his stammering indecision into a cool retort:
“I—met the estate caretaker in the village. He asked me to run on ahead and tell you—and Mr. Whiteside—” Sandy watched, “—he could not find a Six-B slotted bolt anywhere!”
“Oh, couldn’t he?”
Jeff did not change a muscle of his face.
“Sorry he had all the trouble. We got the ‘phib’ engine going and I took Whiteside off on a little private matter in that.”
“Have you brought him back?”
“No. Set down in the little inlet, yonder.” He waved toward the shoreline concealed beyond the estate shrubbery. “It was closer to my own crate—it’s stalled yonder in the golf course.”
“Oh!”
Yes—stalled! Sandy repressed a taunt and pretended to accept the false statement.
“I hear Larry’s been getting instruction off that-there Tom Larsen,” Jeff turned suddenly on Sandy.
“Yes. Mr. Whiteside paid for it.”
It would do no harm, Sandy thought, to let Jeff know that his fellow conspirator, if that was Mr. Whiteside’s real standing, was not playing fair. “When people who may be wicked turn against each other, we learn a lot,” Sandy decided.
He failed in his purpose.
“Tommy’s a good pilot,” Jeff admitted. “Well—I’ll be on my way. See you at the next air Derby!” Jeff grinned at his joke and walked on.
So did Sandy.
While he hurried on, pausing only to collect a “wienie” and roll for lunch, Larry and Dick saw Jeff approach across the green of the fairway and took cover.
“He’s inspecting that airplane—I hope we didn’t leave any clues!” whispered Dick.
“He’s feeling the engine cowling—he wonders how the motor stayed so warm,” Larry retorted under his breath. “Now he’s looking around—get down low, Dick—well, he’s shaking his head. Now he’s in the cockpit. There! He caught the spark on a compression stroke—used his ‘booster magneto.’ There goes the engine.”
And, from the descent of Jeff, to give the ground careful inspection to the moment when he gave up his own baffling puzzle and took off, the youthful amateur pilot reported to Dick, from a spy-hole in the greenery.
“I wonder if Sandy knows Jeff has come on to take his airplane off,” Dick mused.
“It’s safe to go and see. If Mr. Whiteside is on the estate it will look as though we came out extra early. Besides, I’m hungrier than Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Come on!” Larry led the way from the golf course as he spoke.
Sandy, long since safe at the hangar, began to work out his puzzle.
“Somebody was in this hangar the day Jeff made his pretended forced landing,” he told himself. “We saw him. It wasn’t a mistake. We all saw him and that proves he wasn’t just a trick of light in the hangar.”
More than that, he deduced, the man had vanished and yet, after he was gone, there had come that unexpected descent of the rolling door which had first made them think themselves trapped. Sandy argued, and with good common sense, that a ghost, in broad sunny daylight, was a silly way to account for the man. He also felt that it was equally unjust to credit the drop of the door to gravity. Friction drums are not designed to allow the ropes on them to slip, especially if there is no jolt or jar to shake them.
“But the switches that control the motor for the drum are right out on the wall in plain sight,” he told himself, moving over toward them, since the rolling door was left wide open when the amphibian was taken out. “Yes, here they all are—this one up for lifting the door, and down to drop it. And that switch was in the neutral—‘off’—position when we were first here—and it’s in neutral now.”
He tapped the metal with the rubber end of his fountain pan and then shook its vulcanite grip-handle, to see if jarring it caused any possible particles of wire or of metal to make a contact.
“That’s not the way it’s done,” he decided.
He stood before the small switch panel, considering the problem.
His eyes, in that position, were almost on a level with the pole-pieces to which wires were joined to enable the switch metal, when thrust between the flat pole contacts, to make contact and complete the electrical circuit.
“Hm-m-m-m!” Sandy emitted a long, reflective exclamation.
“I never saw double wires—and twisted around each other, at that,” he remarked under his breath. “No—I’m not quite right. The two wires aren’t twisted around each other. One wire is twined around the other.”
He traced the wires down into the metal, asbestos-lined sheathing cable, and was still not enlightened about the discovery. It was not necessary to have two wires. One was heavy enough for the hundred-and-ten volt current that came in from the mains.
“That wire, being twined around the other, makes me think it was added—after the first one was put in,” he declared.
“I wish I could trace it,” he added.
He tried.
Sandy, when he turned around, ten minutes later, knew all that the inside of the haunted hangar could reveal.
Another five minutes, concentrated close to a certain spot on the outside of the building, gave him his final clue.
But instead of waiting to tell his chums his great discovery, instead of keeping vigil, Sandy went away from there as fast as he could walk.
All afternoon he was as busy as a boy trying to keep ten tops spinning!
Never was a returning prodigal greeted with more delight than was Sandy when, close to dusk, with a parcel under his arm, he joined Dick and Larry inside a little Summer house in the Everdail estate grove.
“Where have you been?” demanded Larry. “We hunted high and low! We thought something had happened to you when we saw Jeff fly his airplane away, came here and didn’t locate you.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you. But I’ve been awfully busy.”
“Doing what, Sandy?”
“Following farmer boys down hot, sunny furrows while they picked vegetables for market, Dick.”
“Following farmer boys? What in the world for?”
“To ask them if their fathers would buy a book on family crests and have their coat of arms thrown in free.”
“Have you lost your head, Sandy?”
The youngest Sky Patrol grinned, and shook his head in question.
“No, Larry. It was an excuse to get them talking. I got the book out of Mr. Everdail’s library and used it to make them think I was a subscription agent—so I could ask questions.”
“Ask—questions?”
Dick and Larry spoke together.
“About what?” demanded Larry, and Dick nodded to show he wanted an answer also.
“Well—about who is related to who, and family scandals, and who works for this one and that one—just ‘gossip’.”
Dick caught the impish youth by his shoulders and shook him.
“Stop that! Tell us where you’ve been and what you did? We’ve worried ourselves sick, nearly.”
“I have told you.”
Then he became really serious.
He had been all over that section of the farm-lands, he asserted, to see if he could pick up any information that would give him some connection between either Mr. Whiteside or Jeff, or the mysterious seaplane passenger—and Mimi or the yacht stewardess.
“If I knew that, I thought we could start patching clues together,” he finished. “Because Jeff has a lot to do with this mystery.”
“I think you’re right,” Dick agreed. “But what started you off on that track?”
Taking an arm of each, Sandy led them, wordless, up the path.
Spying carefully to be sure that Mr. Whiteside was not in sight, and being certain that no one else was watching, Sandy led his chums into the hangar.
Across to one of its longer sides he led them.
“These are the switches that work the rolling door motor, you remember?”
“Yes, Sandy. What?——”
“Look at them before it gets too dark, Dick. Do you see anything strange? You know as much about wiring circuits as I do. We both built amateur short-wave sending and receiving sets. You, too, Larry. What isn’t right about the switches or—the wires?”
Thus guided, both studied the switches.
All Larry saw was that the wires were of a braided form.
“But—are they?” He pulled a wire out a trifle from the sheath.
Then his comrades observed what had first attracted Sandy’s attention, puzzled him and led to further search.
One wire, somewhat lighter in its insulation than the other, was wound around the heavier one. They traced it, as Sandy had done. It seemed to wind on down, as did others he showed, from each switch-pole, into the protective sheathing of metal and insulation; but none really were wound any further. From there on down, they ran behind the other wires!
“Bend down, close to the floor,” urged Sandy. “See all the dust and lint piled up?” He scraped some aside.
“My!” exclaimed Larry. “Golly-gracious-gosh-gravy-granny! The wires come out from behind the sheath and turn along the floor, close to the wall—and there’s dust all covering them! No wonder we didn’t notice them.”
“Where do they lead to?”
“Follow the dust line, Dick,” Sandy urged.
Back along the hangar wall they crept, until they came up to the small wooden cupboard with its dusty, frayed protecting burlap across the front. Under the cupboard boards the wires ran well concealed by more dusty lint which seemed to have been swept into the corners by the lazy act of some cleaner.
“Inside here—but don’t use a light—inside here, there are smaller duplicate switches for the electric light arc and the motors,” Sandy informed his breathless, admiring cronies.
They easily proved it. More, they located the wiring in the dusk.
“But how does Jeff get in and out of here?” asked Dick.
“We have to go outside so I can show you what I discovered.”
Trooping around to the rear, at one corner, Sandy bade them bend down and examine the bolted metal sheaths, large plates of sheet iron, that composed the walls of the edifice.
“I don’t see anything,” objected Dick, dejected that he had not been as quick of wit as had his younger chum. “But, then, you saw it first by daylight.”
“I did, that’s so.” Sandy gave them all the information he had. “I saw a break in the paint, only up one-half of this big plate of iron.
“The bottom half pushed inward,” he explained. “It has hinges fixed to the inner part so it will lift up into the hangar and we can creep in.”
He proved it, and they followed him through the fairly low orifice.
“Now,” he said, as Dick, last to crawl in, cleared the edge of the metal, “see how clever this is—the inside of the two plates it has to come down against are fixed with something soft—I think it’s felt—to keep the plate from clanging. It fits so well that the only way I found out about it was by the sun making the dent in the paint show up a few little bright worn spots of bare metal.”
They complimented him with no trace of envy.
“Do you think Jeff did this?”
“Well, Larry, he said he flew over here at night. He chews gum and we saw how fast he chewed the day he pretended to be forced to land here. He knew all about the emeralds. And the most telling thing against him is that his wife—Mimi—is Mrs. Everdail’s maid and was on the yacht——”
“Mimi his wife?”
Sandy nodded at Dick’s exclamation.
“Miss Serena saw her run in her uniform,” contributed Larry.
“How did you discover she was Jeff’s wife?”
“Talking to farmer boys—what they didn’t know, they found out from their older sisters when any of them were picking up early potatoes or snipping asparagus or digging up onions.”
“My—golly—gosh—gracious——”