“Steady, all! Engine’s quit and left us with a dead stick! No danger.”
Neither sixteen-year-old Larry Turner nor Dick Summers, a year his junior, had any more fear than had Sandy Maclaren, hardly thirteen and seated just back of the pilot who, in flying the four-place, low-wing airplane, had called back reassuringly.
“Jeff’s a war ace and knows his stuff,” Larry mused, “and the engine couldn’t have died in a better spot. We are high enough and within gliding distance of that old, abandoned private field.”
Dick, who saw something to make light of in any situation, turned with his plump face cracked by a broad grin.
“I always said whether you fly a crate full of passengers or handle one full of eggs, you get a good break sometimes!”
Larry nodded in his calm, half-serious way.
Only the youngest member of the trio, as the craft nosed into a gentle glide and banked in a turn to get in position to shoot the private landing spot on the old estate, took the occasion as anything but a lark.
Dick joked, Larry admired the skill of the pilot.
And Jeff, chewing his gum casually, justified their confidence.
Sandy Maclaren, with narrowed eyes and an intent frown, bent his gaze on the pilot’s back and muttered under his breath.
“That engine didn’t die. I saw what Jeff did. He was as quick as a cat—but he didn’t fool me.”
His expression altered to a puzzled scowl.
“But why did he shut off the ignition and pretend the engine had stopped—so handy to this old, abandoned estate?”
No answer rewarded his agile thoughts as Jeff skilfully shot the small field, compelled to come in to one side because of tall trees directly in their line of flight, over which his dead engine made it impossible to maneuver. Nor did he get a solution to his puzzle as Jeff cleverly side-slipped to lose momentum, and to get over the neglected, turf-grown runway down which, a little bumpily but right side up, he taxied to a standstill.
“Well,” Jeff said, with a grin, swinging around in his seat and drawing off his helmet, “here we are!”
“If I ever get the money to take flying lessons,” Larry said, “I know the pilot I’m going to ask to give me instruction! When I can make a forced landing like that one, Jeff, I’ll think I’m getting to be a pilot.”
“If ever I get taken into my uncle’s airplane passenger line,” Dick spoke up, “I know who’ll be Chief Pilot—until Larry gets the experience to crowd Jeff out.”
Sandy, his face moody, said nothing.
The tall, slim pilot, grinned at the compliments and then went on working his jaws on the gum he habitually chewed.
“Guess I’ll have to trace my gas line and ignition to see if a break made this trouble.” Jeff began removing his leather coat. “Say! By golly! Do you know where I think we’ve set down?”
“Yes,” Sandy spoke meaningly. “This is the old Everdail estate—the one that’s been in the newspapers lately because the people around here claim the hangar is haunted.”
“I believe it is!” agreed Jeff. “Why don’t you three take a look. Yonder’s a hangar and the roll-door is lifted a little. Maybe you’d spot that there Mister Spook and clear up the mystery while I work.”
“I’d rather go down by the water and see if it’s cooler there,” Sandy said, trying to catch Larry’s eye. “Since we got down out of the cool air it’s the hottest day this June.”
“I’m for the hangar!” voted Dick. “If there’s any specters roaming through that hangar you’ll get more chills there than you will by the Sound.”
“I could stand a shiver or two,” commented Larry, leading the way toward the large, metal-sheathed building at the end of the runway.
Facing them was a wide opening, sufficiently spacious to permit airplanes to be rolled through: in grooved slots at either side the door, made of joined metal slats working like the old-fashioned roll-top desk, could be raised or lowered by a motor and cable led over a drum.
Sandy gave in, and as they walked toward the hangar they discussed the stories that had come out in the news about queer, ghostly noises heard by passers-by on the state road late at night, accounts of the fright the estate caretaker had received when he investigated and saw a queer, bluish glow in the place and was attacked by something seemingly uncanny and not human.
The door, when they arrived, was seen to be partially open, lifted about three feet.
“There’s an airplane in there—it looks to be an amphibian—I see pontoons!” Larry stated.
“Let’s go have a look at it,” suggested Dick.
“Don’t!” Sandy spoke sharply. “Don’t go in there!”
Larry and Dick straightened and stared in surprise. It was very plain to be seen that Sandy was not joking.
“Why?” asked Larry, in his practical way.
“Think back,” said Sandy. “When school vacations started and we began to stay around the new Floyd Bennett airport that had opened on Barren Island, Jeff had his ‘crate’ there to take people around the sky for short sight-seeing hops, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” admitted Larry, “and we got to be friendly because we are crazy to be around airplanes and pilots, and Jeff let us be ‘grease monkeys’ and help him get passengers, too.”
“Surely he did! But when we brought them to go up with him, did he take their money and fly them around, the way others did? Or——”
“No,” Dick admitted. “He generally had something wrong with the crate, or the wind was too high, or he had stubbed his left foot and met a cross-eyed girl, or saw a funeral passing, and thought something unlucky might happen from those signs.”
“Do you really believe anybody can be as superstitious as Jeff tries to make us believe he is?”
“Yes. Lots of pilots are—they think an accident will happen if anybody wears flowers in their ‘planes——”
“All right, Larry, let that go. But why did Jeff bring us here?”
“He said, this morning, we had helped him a lot and he didn’t have money to pay us,” Larry answered. “He offered us a joy-ride.”
“But why did he come so far out on Long Island, and then get a dead stick so handy to this old estate that hasn’t been lived in for years and that has everybody scared so they won’t come near at night?”
“‘Then get a dead stick!’” Larry shook his head. “Why, Sandy! I know you read detective stories until you think everything is suspicious——”
“So do you read them—and Dick, too!”
“But we read to try to guess the answers to the mystery,” Dick declared. “You’ve got the idea that real life is like those wild stories. Everything looks as if it had some hidden mystery behind it—I know what will be your new nickname——”
He chuckled to show there was no malice as he stated the new name.
“Suspicious Sandy!”
“That’s good,” Larry smiled. “Suspicious Sandy thinks a pilot gets a dead stick to make us land near a haunted hangar——”
“I saw him cut the ignition switch!” declared Sandy defiantly.
“You thought you did!”
“I know I did—and, what’s more, here we are at a spot where nobody comes because of the ghost story—and he tells us to go into the hangar and—the door is left up a little way——”
“Oh, Sandy, you’re letting wild imagination run away with you!”
“Am I? All right. You two go on in—and be held for ransom!”
“Ho-ho-ho-ho! That’s good. Suspicious Sandy—is that somebody inside the hangar?” Dick changed his tone suddenly, dropping his voice to a whisper as he stooped and saw something move behind the old amphibian at the back of the building.
“I thought I saw—but it’s gone!” Larry retorted, lowering his voice also.
By a common impulse of curiosity they stooped and went in. Sandy, his own impulse following theirs, was inside almost as quickly.
“There isn’t anybody!” Larry’s eyes became used to the duller light that filtered through the thick dust on the roof skylight.
To their startled ears came a muffled clang, a queer, hollow sound—and as they turned to run back under the rolled-up door, it slid rapidly down in its grooves, dropping into place with a hollow rumble.
“Good gracious golly!” gasped Dick.
“That’s queer!” Larry was a little puzzled.
Sandy, half frightened, half triumphant, spoke four words:
“I told you so,” he whispered.
For a long minute Dick, Larry and Sandy stood in a compact group, feeling rather stunned by the sudden springing of the trap, as they considered the closed hangar.
Larry, calm and cool in an emergency, was first to recover.
“Even if Jeff did want to catch us and demand ransom to let us go,” he remarked quietly, “he wasn’t outside that rolling door—and I don’t think he could pull it down anyhow.”
“No,” Dick agreed, seeing no fun in the situation for once. “See! There is a motor connected to a big drum up in the top of the hangar, and the door is counterbalanced so that turning the drum winds up the cable that pulls it up. I suppose the motor reverses to run it down and——”
“What was that?”
Sandy’s voice was tense and strained.
They heard the strange, hollow sound again, seeming to come from the metal wall, but impossible to locate at once because of the echo.
Rap—tap—tap!
“Somebody’s knocking,” Dick gasped.
“Not somebody—something!” corrected Sandy. “The same ‘something’ that worked the door and shut it!”
“Gracious-to-gravy!” exclaimed Larry, “you don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Sandy? Not really!”
“No human hand touched the switch that ran that door down!”
“I think it did!” challenged Larry. “We thought we saw somebody at the back of the hangar—that’s why we came in! I’m going to see where he is, what he’s doing and why he’s trying to fright—frighten us!”
He broke his sentence in the middle of a word because the queer knocking repeated itself, but with quick presence of mind he completed his phrase to steady Sandy, whose face was growing drawn with dismay.
Larry took a swift, sharp look around the enclosure.
“There’s a big, closed can for waste and oily rags,” he commented, “but anyone would suffocate who hid in that!”
“Well, there’s a clothes cupboard—in the back corner,” Dick said. “Let’s look in that, you and I. Sandy, you stay back and keep watch.” Dick, quick to see Larry’s attitude toward Sandy, wanted to have a dependable chum at his side as he investigated while he hoped to give Sandy more confidence by leaving him in the lighted part of the building, under the smudged, dusty skylight.
“Come on!” agreed Larry.
With Dick he walked boldly enough to the built-in wooden cupboard, protected from dust by a heavy burlap hanging.
Throwing the curtain aside sharply, both youths peered in.
“Nothing but old overalls and some tools on the floor,” Dick commented.
“It’s peculiar,” Larry said doubtfully. “Nobody here—but—” a new idea struck him. Quietly he gestured toward the amphibian, old, uncared for, looking almost ready to fall apart, its doped wings stained with mould, its pontoons looking as if the fabric was rotting on them.
Dick, instantly catching Larry’s notion, went to the forward seat, while Larry took the second compartment behind the big fuel tank.
“Nobody here,” he reported, and investigated, by climbing in the vacant part of the fuselage toward the tail.
“This place is empty, too,” Dick agreed. “Where could?——”
“Oh!”—Sandy almost screamed the word as the dull, hollow knocks came again.
Larry leaped from the wing-step, sent his sharp gaze rapidly around the enclosure and, of a sudden, gripped Dick’s arm so tightly that the plump youth winced and grew chilly with apprehension.
At once he saw Larry’s amazed, relieved expression and followed the older comrade’s eyes.
With an instant return of his old amused self he threw back his head and let out a deep howl of delight.
“Oh—ho-ho-ho-ha-ha! Oh, my!—ho-ho——”
“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Sandy. “Have you gone silly?”
“Oh—ho-ho! Suspicious Sandy!—ho-ho!”
Larry explained.
“You got us all worked up and worried,” he told Sandy, “with your suspicions. And all the time——”
“Ho-ho-ha-ha! All the t-time, we were like mice racing around a treadmill.” Dick had to speak between chuckles. “All the time we ran around in circles so fast we didn’t see the end of the cage. Sus—suspicious Sandy! Thinking we would be trapped and held for ransom! Ho, golly-me! Look around you, Sandy!”
Sandy looked.
His face slowly changed, gradually became red.
“Oh!” His voice was sheepish. “You mean the switch for the motor over by that small metal door they use when they don’t want to run up the big one?”
“That runs the motor,” Larry agreed. “The cable must have slipped on the drum and let the door go down——”
“But,” Sandy clung obstinately to his theories, “why did Jeff pick this haunted place and cut the ignition—and why was the door up in the first place?”
“What do we—ho-ho—care?” Dick chuckled. “Another thing—even if the electric current is off and the motor doesn’t work—look at that small, hinged door—do you see that the knob of the spring lock—is on—our—side!” He broke out in a fresh cackle of laughter.
“But—those raps——”
For reply Larry strode over to the metal door set in the wall for use when anyone chose to enter or leave the hangar.
Throwing it open, he faced Jeff.
“Took you long enough to answer!” grumbled Jeff. “What made you fool with that door and shut yourselves in?”
“What made you cut the ignition!” snapped Sandy, working on the idea he had read in so many detective stories that a surprise attack often caused a person to be so startled as to reveal facts.
Larry and Dick turned their eyes to Jeff.
The older pilot, staring at his accuser for an instant, as though hesitating about some sharp response, suddenly began to chuckle.
“That-there is one on me!” he admitted. “You must have mighty quick eyes.”
“I don’t miss much!” Sandy said meaningly.
“None of us do!” Dick caught the spirit of Sandy’s accusing manner. “I know you’ve been here before, too. There are lots of chunks of old chewing gum stuck around in that front compartment of the amphibian—and someone has been working on it, too. I saw the signs.”
“Chewing gum?” Jeff was startled. Swiftly he strode across the dimly sunlit floor, got onto the forward step, peered into the cockpit.
“That-there certainly is queer,” he commented. “You’re right. Gum is stuck every place, wads of it.”
“And you chew gum!” snapped Sandy, unwilling to be left out of the suddenly developing “third degree” he had begun. Jeff made a further inspection, touched a bit of the dried gum curiously, stepped down and stood with a thoughtful face for a moment.
Presently he walked to an old soap box holding metal odds and ends, washers, bolts and so on. This he up-ended. He sat down, his lean jaws working as he chewed his own gum slowly. Around him, like three detectives watching the effect of a surprise accusation, stood the chums.
Presently Jeff looked up at them.
“Looks bad, this-here, don’t it?” He grinned.
Dick, Larry and Sandy were silent.
“I guess I better explain,” Jeff decided. “I didn’t think you was so suspicious and quick or I’d of done different.”
“You can’t trap us!” challenged Sandy.
“Trap you?——”
“Well, didn’t you make friends with us and let us work on your crate and help get passengers that you never took up? Didn’t you say you’d give us a joy-ride, then come straight here, cut out your ignition and make believe you had a dead stick, land and then try to get us into this haunted hangar?” Sandy ran out of breath and stopped.
“I do think you ought to explain!” Larry said quietly.
“Yes, I did all that—and I guess I will explain. I meant to, anyhow—or I wouldn’t have brought you here.”
They waited, neither convinced nor satisfied.
Fixing accusing eyes on Sandy, Jeff spoke:
“I never dreamed you’d be suspicious of me! I made friends with you all and tried you out to be sure you were dependable and honest and all that—and I did bring you to this place because it is so far from telephones and railroads. But I didn’t think you’d get the wrong idea. I only wanted you in a place it would take time to get away from if you refused to help me.”
“Help you—help you with what?”
Speaking seriously, Jeff replied to Larry’s challenge.
“Help me save the most valuable set of emeralds in the world from being—destroyed!”
Amazed, Dick challenged Jeff’s statement.
“Priceless emeralds—destroyed? You mean—robbers, don’t you?”
Jeff shook his head.
“I don’t think so—but I don’t know for sure who it is. But I do mean to ask you if you’d like to help me, and I don’t think it would be against robbers but against somebody that wants to destroy the Everdail Emeralds.”
“The Everdail Emeralds!” Larry repeated the phrase sharply. “Why, Jeff! I’ve read a newspaper story about them, in a Sunday supplement. That’s the matched set of thirty emeralds——”
“Curiously cut stones,” interrupted Sandy. “I read about them too!”
“That’s the ones.”
“Matched stones—and priceless,” added Larry. “The paper said they were a present to one of Mr. Everdail’s ancestors by one of the most fabulously rich Hindu Nabobs who ever lived.”
“But who would want to destroy them?” Dick wondered.
“That-there is just what I can’t tell you,” Jeff replied.
“How did you get into this?” Sandy’s suspicions came uppermost.
Jeff drew a bulky, registered envelope from his coat, displayed the registration stamps and marks, and his name and address typed on the envelope. Drawing out a half dozen hand written sheets in a large masculine “fist,” he showed the signature of Atley Everdail at the end.
“This-here is what got me going,” he stated. “Want to read it or will I give it to you snappy and quick?”
Sandy extended his hand and Jeff readily surrendered the letter.
“I’m letting you see I am straight with you,” he remarked.
“You said we couldn’t get away to tell anybody anyway,” Sandy said, but he was compelled to admit to himself that although anyone might write such a letter—even Jeff!—the postmark was Los Angeles and the enclosure had every appearance of sincerity.
“Never mind old Suspicious Sandy,” urged Dick. “Let him read that, but you tell us.”
“It will check up, that way, too,” smiled Larry.
“Suits me!” Jeff crossed his legs, leaning against the metal wall, as he related an amazing and mystifying series of events.
“I’m pretty close to one of the richest men in America,” he began. “You see, we both enlisted in aviation units when the big war tore loose and got Uncle Sam mixed up in it. We were buddies, Atley and me. Well, after we came back I stayed in aviation, knocking around from control jobs to designing new gadgets like superchargers and all. But when he went to California and began to organize some passenger flying lines, I stayed East in a commercial pilot’s job.”
“This letter starts off as if you were old friends,” Sandy had to admit.
“Buddies—closer’n brothers,” nodded Jeff.
“Atley Everdail sold out stocks and stuff here and went West to work out some pet ideas about passenger transport,” he told Dick and Larry. “Of course he bought a big place out there and closed up this estate—put it up for sale. Hard times kept it from selling, the same reason made him hang onto that-there swell yacht he owned.”
“I’ve seen pictures of the Tramp,” Dick nodded. “One fine boat.”
“She is that!” Jeff agreed. “Well, as Sandy must be reading, about where he’s got in that letter, Mrs. Everdail, who goes in for society pretty strong, got a chance to be presented, this Spring, before the King and Queen of England at one of their receptions.”
“That’s a big honor,” commented Larry.
“Naturally she dug up all her finest jewelry,” surmised Dick.
“And how!” Jeff nodded. “Now, that-there Everdail necklace that was in his side of the family for generations—that wasn’t took out of the safe-deposit box once in a lifetime, hardly. Most generally the missus wore a good paste imitation.”
“But to appear before royalty—” Dick cut in.
“It says, here, she took the real necklace, on the yacht, when she went to England!”
Sandy had lost his suspicious look. His interest, as much as that of his older chums, was caught and chained by the coming possibilities and he put down the letter to listen to Jeff.
“She did take the string, as the letter says,” Jeff nodded. “It was a secret—they didn’t broadcast it that the necklace was in the captain’s cabin, locked up in his safe. Nobody knew it, not even the lady’s personal maid, as far as anybody supposed.”
“Mr. Everdail didn’t go with her,” guessed Larry.
“He was too busy routing air lines and working out cost, maintenance and operation plans for his big Western lines,” explained Jeff. “But they took all the care in the world of those emeralds. Even on the night of the reception, the imitation string was taken to the hotel Mrs. Everdail stayed at. That-there real necklace was brought to the hotel, in person, by the captain.”
“I don’t see what could happen—did anything happen?”
“That-there is what started things,” Jeff told Dick. “The missus was in her private suite, in the dressing bowdoir or whatever it is, with nobody but her French maid to help, and all the jewels in a box in the room, hid in her trunks.”
“What happened?” Sandy could hardly check his eagerness to learn.
“She was all but ready, dolled up like a circus, I guess,” Jeff grinned, and then became very sober. “All the jewelry was spread out to try how this and that one looked, with her clothes, separate and in different combinations.”
“But what happened?” persisted Sandy.
“There comes a banging on that-there suite door to the hall and a voice hollered, like it was scared to death, ‘Fire! Fire—get out at once!’”
“Didn’t she suspect any trick—was there a trick?”
“She didn’t have time to think. That French maid went crazy and started to hop around like a flea in a hot pan, and yelling, and it upset the missus so much she forgot all about a fire escape on the end window of the suite, and rushed out, snatching up all the strings of beads and pearls and the pins she could carry. But, because she knew it was only imitation and there wasn’t anybody else around anyway, she didn’t bother about the emerald necklace.”
“It was a false alarm—there was no fire!” Larry decided.
“All she found was a paper of burnt matches outside in the hotel corridor that had been set off so when she opened the door she’d smell smoke. Of course she ran back—and——”
As he reached for the letter, and searched on the fourth page, all three of his listeners were holding their breath in suspense.
“Here it is,” he declared, and they crowded around. “Read it, so you’ll see just what I learned about when she went back.”
Bending close, intent and eager, they read:
“Some strong, pungent liquid had been poured on the green necklace,” the letter from the millionaire stated. “No alarm was given. My wife did not want to broadcast either the fact that she had the real gems or the trouble in the hotel. But people had heard the ‘fire!’ cry and doubtless some suspected the possible truth, knowing why she was getting ready.
“Captain Parks came up later with the real stones and while he waited for my wife to finish her costume, he examined the fire escape window and was sure that someone had entered and left by that.
“Now Jeff,” the letter concluded, “my caretaker on Long Island has sent me clippings about a ghost scare on the old estate, and somehow I connect that with the attempt to destroy the emeralds. I can’t imagine any motive, but there are fanatics who do such things from a warped sense of their duty or from spite and hatred of rich folks. For old times’ sake, drop everything, get down to bedrock on this thing at your end—do whatever you think best, but get in touch with the yacht, learn their plans, cooperate with Captain Parks and my wife to bring that necklace back to the vaults, and—I count on you!”
“Golly-gracious!” exclaimed Larry, “that’s like a mystery novel!”
“But it’s no novel!” Jeff said morosely.
“What have you done about it?” asked Larry.
Jeff explained. He had sent a radiogram to the yacht, and as its owner had already sent one identifying Jeff, he was given the information that the real necklace was being brought back, extra heavily insured in a London company, by the captain himself.
“I located and rented this crate we flew here in,” he went on. “I played joy-ride pilot by day at the airport and hopped here of nights. But I couldn’t get a line on anything. I didn’t notice that chewing gum until you, Dick, Larry and Sandy—all of you—started your third degree and showed it to me. But I did think—if anybody was playing ghost here, they might be planning to use the old amphibian for something—maybe to get away to get away with the emeralds if they could get hold of them—in case anybody thought the yacht was due to lay up here.”
“And that’s why you brought us here—to help you watch?” Sandy asked.
“Not exactly. But it came over me that at night I didn’t get anywhere and I thought I’d try coming in the daytime—and being that the yacht is due to make Long Island this afternoon, I thought I might need some help with a plan I’ve worked out.”
“What is it?” eagerly. Sandy wanted details.
“I’ve sent the caretaker here—he’s as dependable as sunrise!—to a place out near Montauk Point lighthouse, with Mr. Everdail’s fast hydroplane boat and I’ve sent a radio message to the yacht captain to be on the watch to meet the hydroplane pretty well out to sea, and transfer the necklace to the boat. Then, the yacht will come on and make harbor here, as though nothing had happened—and all the time the emeralds will be on the way, down the Sound and East River, to a wharf where I’ll have a motor car, with a dependable chum of mine, to take charge and carry the package to safe deposit, get a receipt—and there you are!”
“I still don’t see how we can help!” Sandy spoke again.
“I mean to hop out in the airplane, sort of oversee the business of the transfer, and escort the hydroplane till she lands the emeralds, and then circle around till my friend, with the receipt, goes up onto the bank roof—it’s pretty high up—fourteen stories—and wig-wags an O.K. And I’d like dependable observers——”
“I’m one!” cried Sandy, his suspicions swept away. “Number two is named Larry.” “Dick is a dependable third!”
“We’ll be a regular Sky Patrol!” exulted Sandy. “And watch what goes on while you do the control job—and, that way—nothing can go wrong!” “Not with the Sky Patrol ‘over’-seeing!” Dick, too, spoke overconfidently.
Three youths, thrilled by the prospect of a mysterious adventure, and a war pilot, intent on a friendly service, discussed plans for protecting the Everdail Emeralds.
“I don’t see how anything can slip up,” Larry gave his opinion.
“I don’t know,” Jeff spoke dubiously, uncertainly. “We’ve gone over all the things we can think of that might go wrong—but——”
“But—what?” demanded Dick.
“I had a fortune teller read the cards for me,” Jeff told him. “The nine o’ spades—the worst card of warning in the pack—was right over me and that means trouble—and the ace of spades, a bad card——”
“Crickety-Christmas!” Larry was amazed. “Are you really telling us you believe in all that?”
“I’ve seen that-there card fortune work out before.”
“You’ve twisted things that happened to fit what you wanted to believe,” argued Larry.
“Oh, well,” Jeff did not want to discuss his superstitions, “maybe it won’t come out so bad. I met a pair of colored twins yesterday. That’s a good-luck sign——”
“Look here!” Dick began to chuckle. “We’ve got a queer combination to work with—our Sky Patrol has! Suspicious Sandy—and—Superstitious Jeff!” Sandy grinned ruefully, a little sheepishly. Larry smiled and shook his head, warning Dick not to carry his sarcasm any further, as Jeff frowned.
“How will you know when the yacht is due?” Larry asked.
“I fixed up Atley’s old short-wave radio, in the old house—and I’ve been getting dope from the yacht the last couple of nights. In about an hour we’ll take off, fly out beyond the lighthouse and patrol.”
“Will you have enough gas?” Larry inquired.
“Had some delivered in cans early this morning—down at the boathouse,” Jeff told him. “We can fill up the main tank and get a reserve in my small wing-tanks—enough for ten hours altogether.”
“Let’s get busy!” urged Sandy.
The three comrades were busy from then on.
Only when Jeff was warming up the engine, checking carefully on his instruments, taking every precaution against any predictable failure, was there time for a moment together and alone.
“Now what do you think of your suspicions?” Dick demanded. Sandy shook his head.
“Most of the time I think I was letting imaginitis get the best of me—but every once in awhile I wonder—for one thing, why doesn’t the yacht sail right on to the New York wharf and let the captain take those emeralds to safe deposit?”
“Golly-to-goodness, you’re right, at that!” Larry nodded his head.
“For another thing,” Sandy went on, “anybody could write that letter Jeff showed me—and who is Jeff, when all is said and done?”
“Oh, I think he’s all right,” argued Larry.
“Well, then, let that go. But—he chews gum and there’s gum stuck all over in this amphibian—he’s been here, nights——”
“Suspicion may be all right,” Larry commented, “but what does it bring out, Sandy? What is your idea——”
“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 the Tramp.
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.”
“Mr. Everdail?” Even Dick, questioning as he repeated the name, was a little doubtful. “Why, I thought Mr. Everdail was in——”
“California? So I was. But one of my air liners brought me across in record time.”
Anybody could have learned that the millionaire was in California, Sandy reflected; it would be easy for a clever jewel robber, one of a band, to impersonate the man when he was caught off guard by their exchange of aircraft.
“If you boys were with Jeff you must be all right,” the man advanced, hand extended.
Dick shook it warmly.
Sandy’s grip was less cordial, but he played the part of an unsuspecting youth as well as he could by finishing the handshake with a tighter grip and a smile.
“I thought Jeff might be in the ship, yonder, until he nearly threw us out of control with his propeller wash. Then I thought—he might be——” he hesitated.
“He thought you might be—” Dick smiled as he made the response, winking broadly.
Sandy wished his chum would be more careful.
The man who called himself Mr. Everdail nodded.
“As long as you’re not, and I’m not—what neither of us cared to say,” he turned toward the airplane, “let’s get together! I’m here because my passenger, a buddy of mine, wrenched his shoulder climbing back into the ‘phib’ and we set down here so I could leave him at the fishing shack, yonder, and go back to see what was what. He was in too bad shape to take chances if I felt called on to do any stunts—I thought I could take the air in time to catch that seaplane coming out of the fog, but it fooled me. I already know why you’re here,” he added, “suppose we hop off in Jeff’s ‘crate’ and give a look-see if your friend and my war buddy need any help.”
“You can’t set down if they do,” objected Sandy, his confidence in the man’s possible guilt shaken by his knowledge of Jeff’s war record. “I don’t see, for my part, why Jeff didn’t use the amphibian in the first place!”
“I wondered about that when I got in at the estate, soon after you’d left,” Mr. Everdail—or the man who claimed to be the millionaire—asserted. “I could see he had been working on it, getting it ready—even had the tank full up, but he had disconnected the fuel gauge to fool anybody who might be looking around, I guess.”
“Maybe he landed and changed his mind about using it,” Dick suggested. “On account of taking us in—we organized a sort of Sky Patrol, to oversee things—but everything went wrong.”
“That accounts for it. I didn’t know he was going to make the hop or I might not have come myself—but now—well,” the man broke off his phrase and started to clamber into the control seat, “let’s get going.”
“And leave your passenger?”
“He’s comfortable, lying quiet in the fishing shack.”
Sandy, who had spoken, felt his suspicions returning at the reply. Could there be any reason why they must not identify the other man? Might he be the ringleader, or have some outstanding mark that they had seen before and might recognize?
Dick performed the “mech’s” duties for the pilot in getting the engine started again, then he clambered into his old place. Sandy was already behind their new pilot.
“Whoever and whatever he is,” Sandy mused, “he knows how to lift a ‘crate’ out of the sand.”
The man claiming to be Mr. Everdail made a skillful getaway from the beach, and it took them very little time to get over the marsh, already free of fog.
Dick located the crack-up, Sandy indicated the spot and the pilot dropped so low that his trucks almost grazed the waving eel-grass.
“There’s no amphibian in sight, though!” Dick murmured. “I wonder——”
“I see Larry! Yoo-hoo!” Sandy shouted.
Larry, in his rubber boat, just having given up trying to explain how a number of bits of chewing gum had transferred themselves from the amphibian, where last he saw them—or some like them—to the seaplane, gestured and pantomimed to try to tell them his news.
Flying past they could not fully understand.
The new pilot waved a reassuring glove at Larry and swerved back toward the end of the island. Larry wondered who he was and what his comrades were doing with him; but Larry, always practical, let the questions wait for their eventual answers and continued to study the half-sunken seaplane.
No new clues offered themselves. He detached one of the hard, adhering chunks of gum and dropped it into his pocket, “just in case,” he said, half-grinning, “just in case they transfer themselves somewhere else. I’ll leave twenty-nine of them—and see.”
The supposed Mr. Everdail scribbled a note which he handed back to Sandy, who caught his idea of dropping instructions on the deck of the yacht.
Borrowing Dick’s jackknife for a weight, Sandy prepared the message.
Cruising slowly the yacht came into sight.
Their pilot was skillful at coursing in such a direction and at such a height that he could skim low over the water craft’s radio mast and come almost to stalling speed while Sandy cast the note overside.
Dick, who had caught up Larry’s abandoned binoculars, saw as they zoomed and climbed that a sailor had rescued the note before it bounded over the cabin roof and deck into the sea.
At once the hydroplane was manned and sent away, the yacht took up its own course, and Mr. Everdail—to give him his own claimed title—pointed the airplane’s nose for his estate. Sandy occupied the time of the flight by trying to piece together the strangely mixed jig-saw bits of their puzzle—or was it only one puzzle?
By the time they sighted the hangar and field, he had all the bits joined perfectly. Sandy’s solution fitted every point that he knew, and was so “water tight” and so beautiful that he landed with his face carrying its first really satisfied, and exultant grin.
The beautiful part of it, to Sandy, was that he could sit by and watch, do nothing, except “pay out rope and let them tie themselves up in it.”
For Sandy’s suspects would certainly incriminate themselves.
“Let them guy me and call me ‘Suspicious Sandy,’” he murmured as he followed Dick toward the wharf on the inlet by the shore of the estate. “If I untangle this snarl the way I expect to, I may not bother to go in for airplane engineering. There might be as much money in a private detective office.”
Mr. “Everdail” proceeded at once to tie himself in his first knot.
“Well—hm-m!” he remarked to Dick, “feels good to be on the old place again. First time I’ve set foot on it for three years.”
“And he told us, on the beach, he’d been here this morning,” Sandy whispered to himself.
He decided to pay out another bit of rope.
“Mrs. Everdail will be glad you’re here when she lands,” he remarked.
The man whirled, frowning, hesitated and then spoke very emphatically.
“Look here, boys,” he said earnestly, “don’t say a word to her about me! I won’t be here when she lands—and I don’t want it known I’m in the East. There’s a good reason——”
“I’ll bet there is!” Sandy said to himself.
Turning with a confidential air and addressing Dick, for whom he seemed to have the greater liking, Mr. “Everdail” spoke.
“I’ve just thought of a good scheme. Has Jeff—er—taken you into his confidence any?”
Sandy, helpless to interfere, heard Dick give the substance of what they had learned from the superstitious pilot. The man continued:
“That lets me snap right down to my plan. Now we don’t know where those emeralds are. We don’t know which people used the seaplane, or whether the man who jumped has them and has gotten away or not. But if I should fade out of sight, and no one but my dependable Sky Patrol knows I’m around——”
“Your dependable Sky Patrol!” Sandy thought. “Going to try to use us now. Well——”
“If no one else knows I’m around—I can watch and see a lot that others might miss. I’m going to have that seaplane brought here—and then I’ll be around, watching to see who comes snooping—if anybody does. As I live and breathe, I think that’s a great idea, don’t you?”
Dick agreed readily.
“All right, then. You can tell your other comrade—Larry, you said you call him, Dick. I’ll leave a note for Jeff. Now I’ll go on up to the house and write it and make a couple of telephone calls—and then I’ll drop out of things—but you’ll hear from me off and on till we get those emeralds safe in our hands. Then—even while we’re waiting—if you can get your parents’ consent to stay, which I think can be arranged by Jeff—Larry can take some flying navigation—you, Dick, can study engines and construction, or navigation—whatever you like.”
He put a hand on Sandy’s shoulder and the latter managed not to wince or draw away.
“Sandy can have the run of my library, full of books on engineering and mechanics—and you’ll be learning while you help me get those emeralds and find out who flew the seaplane and who helped them on the yacht.”
“I know I can get my father’s consent to ‘visit you’ here,” Dick said eagerly. “And I like the plan,” he added heartily.
Sandy, watching their confidant stroll toward the closed mansion, turned a cold face to Dick.
“You’re a fine Sky Patrol,” he grumbled. “You swallowed everything he said, like a big softie! And told him everything you knew,” he continued, bitterly.
“Why not?” Dick wanted to know.
“You wait till Larry comes and I tell him my theory!”
“All right,” Dick agreed cheerfully. “But don’t start in earning your nickname all over again,” he warned.
“I’ll have you calling me ‘Successful Sandy’ before I’m through.”
The drone of an incoming airplane took them racing to the landing spot where Jeff came down to report that he had taken the unconscious seaplane pilot to a hospital where it was declared that he had a bad blow on his temple and might not recover his mental clearness for many days.
“And I’m glad I’m done with this-here amphibian,” he added. “Had more trouble than I ever had before. I think the crate’s hoodooed.”
“Maybe the ghost haunting the hangar ‘put a spell’ on it,” Dick chuckled. “Well—don’t, worry, Jeff. You’re down safe, and——”
Sandy shook his head. Let them take Jeff up to the house, he decided, and watch the two men when they met. Dick, not comprehending the idea behind Sandy’s headshake, nevertheless, did not finish his sentence.
The roar of a motor boat began to attract their attention and as they went to the wharf again, Jeff wanted explanations of how they got in with the airplane.
“You won’t make me believe Dick flew that-there crate,” he declared.
“No,” Dick agreed. “I didn’t. You’ll find the man who did up at the house.”
Jeff swerved aside on a graveled path, leaving them to aid the caretaker and his mechanic to bring the hydroplane to its mooring and let Larry jump out to join them.
They compared notes eagerly. Dick and Sandy could hardly forego interrupting one another as they brought their story up to the minute after hearing how Larry had helped to get the pilot to the amphibian, discovering and rescuing the life preserver on the way.
“Now, Larry,” Dick said, finally, “Mr. ‘Everdail’ said we could take you into our confidence, and he’s probably telling Jeff everything. Suspicious Sandy has a theory all worked out. I suppose Jeff is a double-dyed villain, and this Mr. ‘Everdail’ will turn out——”
“It’s no joking matter,” Sandy spoke sharply. “You listen to my idea and see what you think.”
Jeff, the so-called Mr. “Everdail,” and the pilot and passenger of the seaplane, as well as the presumably injured man whom they had not seen—all these were members of an international band of robbers, Sandy claimed.
“The man who jumped with the parachute and life preserver must be named Gaston—from what the pilot said to you, Larry,” he went on.
“Then he must be French, maybe,” Dick said.
“Most likely he is,” agreed Larry. “But if he was——”
“Wait till I get to that,” urged Sandy. “Well, they learned, somehow, that Mr. Everdail was in California and his wife was taking the emeralds to London. They didn’t have any conspirator on the yacht—then—or else they would have gotten the real emeralds long ago. So there was just those five in the band—Jeff, Mr. ‘Everdail,’ Gaston, the man we haven’t seen, and the injured pilot.”
“There might have been two gangs, one of three, one of two—or three bands—one of two, one of two, one of one——”
“Don’t poke fun at him, Dick. He argues reasonably so far.”
“Thanks, Larry,” Sandy was grateful. “All right, then, the band planned the work in London, at the hotel—that’s how Jeff knew the emeralds were imitations they poured acid on.”
“Did they carry acid just in case?” Dick could not restrain his tendency to tease.
“I think it was something they meant to throw on anybody who tried to stop them.”
“Golly-gracious! That might be,” Larry exclaimed.
“Anyhow, they discovered the false emeralds and tried to destroy them.” Sandy was more confident at Larry’s acceptance of his ideas.
“They managed to get somebody on the yacht,” Sandy guessed, “and then to be sure that there was no hitch, divided into three groups—Jeff, possibly the ringleader after all, in his airplane, two in the seaplane, the other two in the amphibian.”
“The confederate on the yacht was to secure the gems, somehow, and they must have had a radio somewhere to get messages,” Larry was beginning to see daylight and to concur with Sandy’s opinions.
“Yes,” Sandy nodded, “and they all went to the appointed place——”
“But Jeff interfered with the amphibian,” objected Dick, “and you forget to account for the two men in the hydroplane.”
“I think it came out the way it does in books,” Sandy declared. “Each set wanted those emeralds, and they tried to outdo one another—and maybe the hydroplane was the honest one of the lot, with Mr. Everdail’s—the real one’s—caretaker, summoned by the captain.”
“But Jeff had us signal them,” Dick said.
“They must know Jeff,” added Larry.
“I know how that fits,” Sandy spoke earnestly. “The hydroplane men were honest, and Jeff worked into their confidence and offered to help them—to discover the plan!”
“Well—that’s possible,” Larry admitted.
“We know what happened. Jeff signaled, but he knew the amphibian was coming, and the seaplane, to make sure neither would break down and leave him helpless—while he supervised,” Sandy had good going now, “the seaplane got the life preserver, and then Jeff decided that they might get away, tried to follow—and while the seaplane was flying, its passenger got the emeralds free of the life preserver, and then——”
“Now you’re stalled,” chuckled Dick, but Sandy was not defeated.
“The passenger, while they were high up, threw something and hit the pilot, the seaplane went out of control, the man jumped—and then cut free his parachute, cut the sack holding the emeralds, and hid in the swamp.”
“Why wouldn’t he take the rubber boat?”
“It would be missed, Larry. He was too bright for that.”
“How could he get away?”
“Why, Dick! Wait till everybody was gone, then take to the rubber boat, get himself picked up——”
“If the boat isn’t there when they bring up the seaplane, I’ll think you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Larry conceded.
“I know I have.”
“Sh-h-h! Here comes Jeff.” Larry turned. “Well, Jeff——”
“He says you know all about him, but he was gone when I got this-here note.” He failed to display the missive, to Sandy’s disappointment. It would have provided a fine chance to compare the writing with what he had seen in the letter supposed to have come from California. And—if he was really flying East, why had Mr. Everdail written? A letter, by mail, would be slower than an airplane flight!
“I don’t like this plan a-tall, a-tall,” Jeff went on, dubiously. “That seaplane is jinxed.”
“Oh—pshaw, Jeff——”
“I don’t care, Larry. Listen—she cracked up and her pilot got a bad smash—from something! And—the emeralds vanished!”
“We recovered the life preserver, anyhow,” chuckled Dick. “And here comes the yacht so we can return that much property. I tell you, the Sky Patrol has accomplished something!”
Jeff did not share Larry’s smile. He imitated Sandy’s scowl.
“He says for me to shove my crate in the hangar, stay here, get your parents to let you make a visit and Larry learn flying and so on, but if I put my crate in that hangar—it haunted and now the jinxed seaplane to come in—any instruction I give will be at your own risk.”
“I’m not worrying,” Larry said.
“And say—here’s a queer one.” Jeff changed the subject. “I notice them chunks of gum wasn’t in the amphibian! Did you take ’em out when you stayed back in the hangar, Sandy?”
“No—or, if he did, somebody else put the same kind in the seaplane.” As Larry spoke he withdrew from his pocket a dark, hard object.
“Give that here!” cried Sandy, snatching at it.
He tore at the hard substance with finger-nails, working it flatter, and then, with an exultant screech, boy-like but not good practice for an amateur detective, he pointed to something dark, green, glowing.
“There’s one of the Everdail Emeralds!” he exulted.
“How did you ever guess the gem was in the gum?” Dick stared admiringly at Sandy, exultantly at the green light flashing from that hidden emerald as Sandy scraped aside the clinging substance from it.
“First the gum was in the amphibian,” Sandy said, trying to be as modest as the discovery would let him, “then it was gone. We thought we saw somebody in the hangar when first we went in—but he got away somehow. Then we saw the amphibian flying and it flashed over me that whoever we had seen before had been working on the amphibian and had chewed up all those pieces of gum—but I didn’t see why he had left it there. Then, when we found out that the man calling himself ‘Everdail’ didn’t look for or miss the gum, I guessed that he hadn’t been the gum chewer—but who had, then, I wondered. And why. It must have been for some reason, because if he had found the gum when he came to play ghost, keep everybody away from the estate by scaring them, and get the amphibian ready, he’d have throw any gum he found into the waste can.”
“The gum was there for some reason,” agreed Dick. “This is one time when being suspicious has paid,” he added.
“Yes,” Sandy admitted. “When the life preserver was found and no gems were in the oilskin tied to it, and Dick showed me the gum, the reason for the big chunks of old gum came to me. The passenger had been getting it ready. He had to chew a great lot to get enough.”
“We mustn’t waste any more time,” cried Larry, eagerly. “There are twenty-nine more chunks in the seaplane. Let’s fly there, Jeff, and get it.”
“That-there is good sense.” Jeff started toward the flying field. “The fellow we didn’t find might come back for the emeralds.”
Going with them, to help out, Dick told Larry that he proposed to go at once to the various airports and flying fields, to learn, if he could, who had engaged the seaplane.
“The new Floyd Bennett field is the best chance,” argued Jeff. “They have got water and seaplane facilities there. It’s on Barren Island, and that’s where a man could have gone, in about the time between your seeing the ‘spook’ and the time the seaplane got where the yacht was.”
“I’ll wait for the yacht,” Sandy said, accompanying them. “Mrs. Everdail will be glad to see what I discovered.”
That gave each of the members of the Sky Patrol something to do.
Dick had no difficulty in learning, when he got the executives of Bennett field interested that the seaplane was an old one belonging to a commercial flying firm operating from the airport.
“The pilot who handled the control job,” the field manager told him, “was a stunt man who has been hanging around since he stunted on our opening day. I’ve questioned some of the pilots for you, but no one seems to know who the pilot had with him. A stranger, one says.”
That brought Dick’s quest to a dead stop.
Sandy had even less success. Although in the short time since his disappearance the supposed impersonator of Mr. Everdail could not have gone far, he was not to be discovered by any search Sandy could make.
Farmhouses had no new “boarders.” The house on the estate, searched with youthful vim and alert thoroughness, revealed no observable hiding places. Sandy finally gave up.
The arrival, anchoring and debarkation of its people by the yacht allowed him to meet and to reassure Mrs. Everdail and Captain Parks.
Besides these two he met the almost hysterical French maid, Mimi, also Mrs. Everdail’s companion and cousin, who had traveled with her, a quiet, competent nurse and attendant whose lack of funds compelled her to serve as a sort of trained nurse for the millionaire’s wife, who was of a very nervous, sickly type.
In spite of everybody’s relief when Sandy displayed the emerald, the elderly trained nurse and companion insisted that Mrs. Everdail must retire, rest and recover from her recent exciting experience.
Sandy, left alone, searched the hangar for an unseen exit, but found none.
Landing the amphibian, at almost the same spot they had set down before, Jeff looked around for the rubber boat they had left tied to a sunken snag.
“I guess Sandy’s ideas were right, after all,” decided Larry as he saw that the small water conveyance was not there. Sandy had claimed that if the missing seaplane passenger had hidden during the recent search of the seaplane, the boat would aid him to escape from the otherwise water-and-swamp-bound place.
“If the rubber boat’s gone,” Jeff commented, “the twenty-nine other emeralds of the thirty on the necklace—they’re gone, too.”
“I’ll have to swim over again and see.” Larry stripped and made the short water journey.
“They’re still here,” he shouted across the channel.
Jeff, who had kept his engine idling, decided to risk a closer approach in the amphibian whose lower wingspan barely cleared the tops of grass clumps.
“I guess there aren’t any snags to rip the pontoons,” Larry assured him. To get closer would save Larry many trips to and fro in the water.
“Fine!” Larry commented as the amphibian, moving cautiously, came close enough for him to catch a rope and put a loop around the closest truss of the submerged seaplane. Thus he was able to pass the chunks of gum to Jeff, who had his clothes on and pockets for storage.
While the transfer was being made the amphibian’s engine died with unexpected suddenness.
“Golly-gracious!” Larry exclaimed, “I’ll bet she’s out of gas.”
“Can’t tell by the gauge.” Ruefully Jeff upbraided his stupidity in forgetting to see if they had to gas up before the take-off from the estate.
“Now what’s to do?” he wondered.
Larry, too, saw a number of difficulties—perhaps more than did Jeff, because, from Larry’s point of view, due to Sandy’s suspicion of the superstitious pilot, Jeff must not go free with the gems in his pockets, nor did Larry dare be the one to go. If he did, Jeff might be playing a trick, let him get beyond chance of return in time, use some reserve gas and fly away.
“I can’t swim,” Jeff began, considering the ways of escape to some place where they could secure a supply boat with fuel.
“I wouldn’t chance swimming all the way down the swamps to the nearest village on shore,” Larry said quietly.
“This-here is a fix that is a fix,” morosely Jeff summed up the situation. “Here we are with a pocketful of emeralds—and no gas and no way to get to any—and if anybody knows the gems are in this gum—we’d be helpless if they wanted to take them.”
Larry did not answer.
He was mentally going over the seemingly unbreakable deadlock.
One thing that kept coming into his mind was the strange fact that if the disappearing passenger of the seaplane had taken the rubber boat he had not also taken the hidden jewels.
“He must have known something about them—or guessed,” he reflected. “If they were put in the gum while they were flying—unless it was done while they were in the fog. But, even then, he knew all that excitement meant something. I don’t understand it—he did know, because he must have hired the pilot and the seaplane to get the emeralds.”
Still, in that case, he mused, if the man had known where the gems were, why hadn’t he inflated the rubber boat and taken them all, in the first escape?
A possible solution came to him.
Saying nothing to Jeff he bent his whole power of thinking on the more important discovery of a way to get fuel.
Climbing onto the amphibian and dressing, he considered that matter without arriving at any workable solution.
His eyes rested for a moment on the upthrust wing of the submerged seaplane. His face changed expression. An idea flashed across his mind.
“Jeff,” he cried, “do you suppose we could make a gas line from the brass tubing on the seaplane?”
“What for?”
“See that wing?” he pointed. “It sticks up, and it’s higher than our own tank—and if there’s a wing-tank, and I think a seaplane would have them——”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” grinned Jeff. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that-there is right.”
He carefully climbed out onto the amphibian’s lower wing till he could grip a guy wire on the seaplane. By agility and a good deal of scuffling with some damage to the doped fabric of the seaplane, he got into the partly sunken pilot’s seat and from that, climbing up, sent a quick glance over the cockpit, tracing the fuel lines.
“Right as can be!” he called. “Now if I can find a wrench and get loose some brass tubing——”
“Can I help?”
Jeff, bent down in the pilot’s seat, lifted his head, shaking it.
“Stay where you are,” he called. “Two might push the crate down into the mud too fast for safety. She’s half a foot deeper in than when we were here before. I’ll manage.”
Shutting off the governing valve, Jeff began unscrewing the pipe lines, rejoining lengths of piping until, with a section from the carburetor to give the needed length, he passed over a makeshift path for the wing-tank gas to flow by gravity into their own craft.
“All ready!” called Larry, bending the end of the line so its flow went into the central tank of the amphibian.
Jeff opened the gas valve under the wing-tank.
“Here she comes!” Larry was exultant.
“We’ll get enough to hop down the shore to a fuel supply, anyhow,” Jeff said.
The gauges were out of commission and they had to figure the amount they secured from the size of the pipe and time that the gas flowed.
“I guess that’s all—about seven gallons,” said Jeff as the last drops fell into their tank. Larry threw aside the useless pipe, sent home the tank cap and dropped down into the after seat to be sure the ignition was off before Jeff swung the propeller sturdily to suck the gas into the cylinders.
So intent had they been on the business of the gas transfer that as Jeff swung the “prop” both were taken by surprise when a curt voice came from close under the amphibian’s tail assembly.
“Put your hands up—both of you! Quick!”
A man, coming silently from some concealment, in a dory, undetected in their busy absorption, held something menacingly businesslike and sending sun glints from its blue steel. Its hollow nose covered both at the range he had.
Up went Larry’s hands. Jeff, also, elevated his own.
“Now!” remarked the stranger, pulling the dory around without losing his advantage, “both turn your backs and clasp your hands behind you!”
“Wait!” said Larry, suddenly, earnestly. “I’ll give you the jewels without making any trouble—if you’ll let me put my hand in my pocket I’ll throw the emeralds down to you.”
The man stared, amazed, either incredulous or not quite understanding.
Larry had no emeralds and was well aware of it. Jeff still made his pockets bulge with the packed chunks of gum.
But Larry had seen a chance that they might turn to their own advantage if once the man’s eyes could be diverted from Jeff. Just before he had clambered onto the forward bracing to spin the amphibian’s propeller, Jeff had laid down the sturdy wrench he had used for bending the pipes; evidently he meant to transfer it to his own tool kit but had wished to start the amphibian’s engine first.
The wrench, within his reach, could be used as a weapon. Larry had caught Jeff’s flash of the eyes toward it as his hands had been elevated. From Jeff’s expression Larry saw, out of the corner of his eye, that the older pilot caught the younger comrade’s purpose.
“All right,” the man had recovered his surprised wits and was closely watching Larry. “Which pocket?”
“This one!” Larry, carefully keeping fingers spread wide, tapped one side of his coat.
“Throw the package or whatever it is——”
Jeff’s hand was quietly coming down.
“It’s stuck!” Larry began to tug, with his hand in his inside pocket where he pretended the jewels were.
“No monkey shines!” warned the stranger, watching closely.
Jeff’s hand flashed down, the wrench, with a twisting, underhand fling, spun through the air. Jeff dropped into the cockpit. The wrench struck, hitting the man’s arm and deflecting the muzzle of his weapon as it exploded—but he did not drop it.
In that split minute of time Larry was on the cockpit seat—and plunged, in a swift, slantwise leap, down upon the man in the dory.
His unexpected assault was executed so rapidly that the man had not time to recover from the surprise and get his weapon trained, before Larry was on him, sending him sprawling backward.
“Oh—my shoulder!” the man cried out in sudden anguish.
Larry, startled, seeing the pain in the face just under his own, relaxed for an instant, only being sure that his quick grip on the wrist holding the weapon in its hand was not released.
“Oh!” the man groaned, and dropping his weapon, he began to nurse his shoulder.
Larry suspected some trick, but there was none. The man tamely surrendered. As he nursed his painful muscles, a sudden misgiving came over Larry.
The man, he recalled, in pulling with his arm, had winced, before he got the dory where he wanted it. His cry, his subsequent favoring of his shoulder, told Larry the truth.
“You’re the man who was in the amphibian when Mr. Everdail flew it!” he said. “How did you get here, with your injured shoulder?”
“Tide brought me through a channel. I felt better, saw a spare dory and watched some debris on the water and reckoned the tide would get me to where I could see where the amphibian set down. I saw it hop off the beach, saw it disappear, heard it and saw it coming back—and was curious—but how did you know about Mr. Everdail—and who was in the seaplane, and in the other crate I saw?”
“Here comes the tug and floating crane, to salvage the seaplane,” said Jeff. “You’ll have to stay in the tug deckhouse, till we get the straight of this—and for holding a gun on us. You can explain to the police, maybe—as for us, we don’t need to explain!”
And, as later, he and Larry resumed their places in the amphibian, Larry’s captive remained under guard on the tug.