Sandy was first to hear the call and locate it. The others, not expecting a cry for help from within the hangar until they had seen some one go in, when Dick would be only a sort of surprise attacker while they proposed to make the capture, Larry and the detective were confused for an instant.
Then, recovering, and supposing Dick had called from close inside the hangar, they took the quickest way in, and interfered with one another at the small opening in the plates.
Sandy, dashing toward the hangar, correctly supposing Dick had called from its smaller doorway, did not see Jeff emerge from the old house and start on a run in the same direction.
Dick, clinging with all his strength to a wiry, supple powerful body, strove to keep that hold while he captured the hands that were pounding at his neck and averted face.
Hot, quick puffs of breath fanned his cheek.
Hissing, sibilant gasps marked the throes of the struggle.
Unexpectedly the figure went limp.
Dick clung. He heard the aides coming in through the metal opening. He caught the pound of Sandy’s approaching shoes.
But he did not believe he had made his captive so tamely surrender.
He realized that with a hand at her side the woman was striving to get at something in her skirt.
He slipped his arm down lower so that his hand encountered her wrist.
That lessened his ability to hold with the arm that was already aching from its prolonged strain. His hand gripped convulsively in the folds of the dress at the back; but his grip was not as tight as it had been because his mind was concentrated on stopping that other hand!
He felt a knee coming up.
Involuntarily he shrank back from a possible kick in some vital spot.
Like a cat the figure squirmed, a heel, small and sharp, came down on his foot. He grunted and winced and the figure broke his grip.
Pushing him, leaping backward, only to catch balance, the form wheeled on agile feet and ran for the grove.
Sandy, within sighting distance, cut into the wood to intersect the path of flight.
Dick pounded after the woman.
From the door of the hangar Larry and Mr. Whiteside emerged to join the chase.
“If I could have held her one second more!—” panted Dick.
“Her?” cried Larry.
The grove had prevented him from seeing the escaping figure.
“It was Mimi, I guess!”
They all disappeared into the grove, and Jeff, coming rapidly closer, paused to listen to the sound of the pursuit.
A smile, inscrutable in the dark, crossed his face, twisted his lips. He turned into the hangar.
Down the wood’s path raced Dick, Larry slightly ahead of him, the detective, older and not so quick, bringing up the rear.
“Scatter!” cried he. “She has turned off!”
“Here she is—” Sandy shouted, but a crash indicated that he had stumbled or missed his footing on slippery sod or pebbles.
The chase turned toward him.
Recovered, he dashed in pursuit of the woman.
Their quarry was fleet, clever and terrorized: she led them always toward the water, down hill.
Sandy, having hurt his foot somewhat in his stumble, was quickly out of the race.
He decided to go back and see if the hangar, with its door wide, was still deserted. Sandy had a misgiving that the woman might be a decoy and that the hangar ought to be watched.
As Dick passed at a slight distance, Sandy told his idea.
“That’s—so,” panted Dick. He decided that the other two must be both fleeter and more agile than he, with his fat; so he returned with Sandy, to a point where they saw that the door was in the same relative position they had left it—wide.
“I don’t think we need to stay here—both of us,” Sandy said. “And if Jeff went into the house, he may have come out. Suppose he plans to get hold of that life preserver, and the woman was sent ahead to get us all away—” He considered that, then went back to his original idea, “Then it would be a good thing for me to get back to where I can watch that amphibian.”
Dick agreed.
He went inside the hangar, closing the door, and resumed his vigil.
In a short time two others returned, to knock on the door and to inform Dick, when he opened it, that the woman, clever planner that she proved herself, had arranged the small motor-boat of the estate so that its engine was going; by a ruse she had gotten far enough ahead of them while they stopped to “capture” her discarded coat after she had cried out as if she had stumbled. That enabled her to get to the boat. They had no way to overtake her as she swept out of the inlet. Evidently she had started the boat motor in the afternoon while they were away, or they would have heard the roar of the start though no one had noticed the softer purr of it as it idled.
Then they went into the hangar and Mr. Whiteside, listening to Dick’s report, from Sandy, of Jeff’s movements, swung his flashlamp around.
From each came an amazed, horrified gasp.
The life preserver was gone!
“Keep your heads, boys,” counseled Mr. Whiteside.
“We will—but come on—Jeff’s making for the amphibian—let’s——”
“Sandy went back to guard it,” Dick told Larry who had spoken.
“Not alone is Sandy on watch, but I arranged to have Tommy Larsen bring his airplane to the golf green Jeff used this afternoon,” Mr. Whiteside told them, as he walked, recovering breath, toward the hangar door.
“Tommy is to keep his engine warm, idling, and to be ready, at the first sign of escape, to take the air and overtake Jeff,” he added.
“But maybe Sandy might get into trouble,” urged Larry. “He’d fight to stop Jeff, and that man is in a dangerous mood if he’d do what he has done.”
“It will do no harm to go over,” agreed Mr. Whiteside, slamming the door behind them. “It’s shorter down along the water.”
At a jog trot they went down the slope and at the wharf Dick gave a cry of surprise.
“There’s the motor boat—drifting just off the dock!”
“Then that woman—Mimi—came back to rejoin Jeff!” argued Larry, and broke into a run. “Come on, fellows!”
Down the wharf path they ran, turning into the shell-powder path that skirted the inlet on the far side of which the amphibian lay moored.
“Sandy will stop them,” panted Dick, a little to the rear because of his weight. Larry called, over his shoulder, that with two to give battle to, Sandy might need them before they could arrive.
“There’s somebody—on the lawn!” cried Dick, swinging off in that direction. From behind a large tree emerged a figure. Larry and the detective followed at a run. But the man who came quickly forward to meet them gave all three a surprise.
“Tommy!” Larry recognized the pilot.
“Larsen, why aren’t you by your airplane?” demanded Mr. Whiteside.
“I came over to report and get instructions, sir.”
“Why, I gave——”
“Something new has come up, sir. I was waiting there by my ship a good while back, and I heard another one cruising and spiraling, shooting the field, I guess, because he came in and set down. My crate, just the way you ordered, was down by the grove, not in plain sight in the middle of the course. But Jeff set his ship down, left the engine running, and went off. I stayed hid to see what would happen, but when he didn’t come back, I thought I’d better go and find you—and see if it meant anything to you.”
“Jeff’s working with his wife, we think,” volunteered Larry. “Anyhow a woman slipped in and led us out of the hangar and started away in a motor boat, and then she must have come back, because yonder’s the boat——”
“See anything of Mimi?” asked Mr. Whiteside eagerly.
“Haven’t laid eyes on the lady.”
“She must have met Jeff and gone with him. We’re going to see.”
“I have orders, at that,” Mr. Whiteside told the pilot. “You go back and get into the air and then cruise around—just in case Jeff does get started.”
“I will that.”
“It would take him some time,” argued Dick.
“He could start his motor and taxi while it warmed up, and be half across the Sound before he took off if he wanted to, in that ‘phib,’” the pilot said. Turning, he called that he would get going, and returned beyond their view beyond the trees.
Dick, Larry and Mr. Whiteside, listening for a call from Sandy, went hurrying along. But no call from Sandy. He had decided that it would be a wiser thing to hide than to risk doing battle with the pilot if he was actually as bad as they suspected; with that in mind he had crawled in through the opening from the back, into the fuselage of the amphibian. There, fairly comfortable, he lay, full length, listening. The open top allowed air to come because a strong, puffy breeze had gotten up, driving great, black thunderclouds before it.
Sandy regretted his ruse presently, because he heard a boat and realized that he could not see who occupied it: furthermore, while his position would enable him to be hidden and to go along if Jeff took off, he would be helpless in case of an accident to the craft.
When he decided to get out, it was almost too late—but not quite.
Jeff got his engine going by setting it on a compression point when he had primed the cylinders and using his booster magneto to furnish the hot sparks that gave it its first impulse.
Then, as soon as he heard Jeff drop the mooring rope and get in, Sandy backed to a point where he could crawl to hands and knees, poked his head up carefully, saw Jeff, adjusting his helmet as the engine roared, and was able to climb over the seat back into the place behind the tank before Jeff decided they were warmed up enough, got the craft on the step and lifted it into the darkness, lit by intermittent flashes of approaching lightning.
Sandy snapped his safety belt.
“Now, Mister Jeff,” he remarked, safe behind the roar of their climb. “Go anywhere you like—life preserver and all. I’ll make the tracks ‘sandy’ for you if you want to stop!” He employed a railway expression, whimsically applying it to the airplane instead.
Dick, Larry and the detective, hearing the roar of the engine, delayed not a moment in their dash around the rest of the inlet shore.
They found that the amphibian was well out on the Sound, saw it lift.
It climbed in a northerly direction.
As they reached the vicinity of its starting point and called and searched for Sandy, they heard the drone of another engine and saw the red-and-green and the white flying lights of what must be Tommy’s craft, also going northerly in pursuit.
“There he goes!” Larry cried. “There must be some place in Connecticut that Jeff and the woman with him know about—remember, Tommy’s passenger had him flying in that direction when the seaplane crashed, and the hydroplane boat went that way—by gracious-golly-gravy! Do you suppose it could have been the woman who ran off with that other life preserver, while Jeff pretended he was too sick to take up a ship?”
“It could be,” Dick replied. “I’m wondering more about Sandy.”
“Let’s go back to the house and make sure he didn’t stop there to see what Jeff had been doing before,” Larry suggested. “He may have missed going with Jeff. If the woman had been along he’d have had no place and they would have left him here. But there isn’t a trace.”
“No signs of any struggle either,” said the detective who had investigated with his flash.
They returned to the house.
In the library, where Sandy had told Dick he had seen a glimmer of light, they saw nothing especially unusual, unless they could attach importance to an old photograph album, lying open on a corner settee with several small snapshots removed and only the gummed stickers left to show they had been there and what their size was.
“No Sandy,” said Dick, worried. “Do you suppose they?——”
“I wonder if he saw two people coming and crawled into the fuselage,” Larry said.
“He might have. I wish we could follow and see.”
“I’m ready—and I think I’d be safe to fly, even if it does look like storms. We could outfly Jeff, anyhow, catch up with him——”
He pointed to an open telephone book beside the instrument on the side table.
“It’s a Long Distance book, too—and its open at the E’s!” Dick glanced swiftly down the pages, “Evedall—Ever—Everdail!” he looked up with a surprised face.
Instantly Larry caught up the receiver.
“Long Distance Operator, please,” he spoke into the transmitter.
“Yes?”
“Long Distance?” He gave the number of the Everdail Maine estate, secured from the open book. “Has that number been called recently? Can you tell me?”
“Just a moment,” came back to him.
The moment became two—three——
“Hello! It has! At ten o’clock. Thank you. Someone has been using our house telephone, then. Goodbye!”
“It was called!” the detective showed a baffled face.
“And by Jeff!” Larry consulted his watch. “The time checks with the report Sandy gave that Jeff was here. He called Mr. Everdail—why?”
“To tell him about the life preserver—and maybe to deliver it!”
“But Dick—he would never take it there if he means to——”
“I begin to think he doesn’t mean to make away with it.”
“But it had to be a pilot who did all the things we have evidence of, Dick.”
“Well—there’s another pilot!”
“And he’s flying after Jeff!” gasped the detective—leaping up he started out. “Come, boys—Larry, will you try to fly us? I’ve been on the wrong angle all along. Will you take us in Jeff’s airplane, Larry?”
Larry would!
Jacketed from the supply Jeff kept for passengers, two of the Sky Patrol and a discomfited detective rose in the air and joined the pursuit.
It was to have an unexpected outcome.
Hour after hour, into a North wind that cut down their forward mileage somewhat, Larry held the airplane.
He flew low, in order to hold the coastline of the ocean, because he did not dare try to navigate, inexperienced as he was, with no practice at “blind flying” above the clouds.
Thunderstorms menaced, but always they were to the inland side, and Larry did not have to pass through them, or climb above them and lose his way.
Boston, easily recognized for its expanse and illumination, as well as by the name-markers on certain roofs, painted there by air-minded owners, finally came into view.
They circled until Larry located the large airport there.
Noting its white boundary lights, its red warnings, its windsock to give him the direction of the air currents, he circled the field several times, to be sure he would not foul any other ship, and to see if any signal would be sent him.
Presently, after a commercial freight carrier had taken off, he got two red lights, a signal to land, and as the field was wonderfully well lighted, and he had learned to judge distance from the ground well, Larry was repaid for his self-control and confidence and care by making a perfect three-point landing.
Mr. Whiteside’s explanations seemed to clear away need for formality.
While they were gassing up the airplane, he went to the administration building and chatted with the field manager.
“The others are still ahead of us,” he reported to Larry and Dick as they munched a hurried meal and drank hot coffee, also securing additional flying togs to supplement what they had.
“I wonder how much we’ve caught up on them,” Larry said.
“Well, the amphibian stayed only a few minutes, and it wasn’t gone five minutes before the other one came in——”
“A two-place biplane?” asked Larry.
Mr. Whiteside nodded.
It remained only to get information, he stated, and then went up.
“Oh, dear,” he finished. “I gave Tommy orders to ride down Jeff if he had to, in order to stop him, and to get him arrested. I wish I could stop him!”
“Who was in the first ’plane?” Dick asked.
“Sandy was there—they saw a boy, and Jeff got him some gloves; and they seemed surprisingly friendly.”
“That means that Jeff is innocent and has made friends with Sandy; but where is the woman?”
Answering Dick, Mr. Whiteside explained.
“She was in the second airplane.”
“With Tommy!” exclaimed Larry. “Then he’s the one we want to catch, as well as to save Jeff and Sandy from being driven down.”
They wasted no time.
Friendly pilots, considering Larry such a boy aviator as Bobby Buck had proved to be, gave him some instructions that were most valuable, concerning night flying. The wind would be dead ahead, for most of his trip toward Maine, and he could check his direction by that until he had to veer to the West of North, when the wind, quartering, would drift him off the course—but they gave him rough corrections, and advised him to get above the clouds that were bearing down on Boston—local thunder storms.
Once more the low-wing craft took the air, climbed to a good height, Larry used his instructions, got the nose into the wind and drove ahead.
Slowly, as the distance behind them increased, their distance behind the other two ships grew less. Minute by minute they cut their handicap. Dick strained his eyes ahead, and to either side, watchful, eager.
He said almost nothing into the Gossport tube he had at his lips.
Larry knew his business: Dick wore the instructor’s part of the outfit only because it was the only helmet they could get at the start.
Under them black clouds, torn by vivid streaks of blue-white light, reeled backward, their tops tumbling and tossing.
Above them the night sky shone serene, with the full moon, just nicked by the curve of old Mother earth, riding higher and higher.
That was a glorious picture, had any one of them had the wish to enjoy it. But they were intent on much more important sights than that of a lovely sky.
“Flying lights ahead—” Dick spoke excitedly into the Gossport tube.
“Two sets—” he added.
Larry moved the throttle forward as far as it would go.
He peered ahead.
“Yes! There they are! Just a little below our level.”
Closer and closer they approached. The two airplanes were vividly visible in the bright light reflected upward also from the fleecy tops of wind-tossed cloud.
“They’re stunting—” Dick gasped.
“No—not stunting,” Larry forgot his voice would not reach Dick. “They’re maneuvering.”
It was clear to him. The amphibian, easily identified by its clumsy, bulky looking trucks, with the pontoons slung to braces, was trying to get away from a relentless biplane which sought to overtop it, to ride down onto its tail, force it down.
Two war pilots fought it out above the clouds!
In the airplane with one sat a woman whose presence marked him for a dangerous character, after the Everdail emeralds.
Behind the other pilot sat one of the Sky Patrol, at the mercy of a devilishly minded adversary, and he was as helpless to save himself as Larry and Dick were to aid him!
Larry, thinking of that, but hoping against hope that for all his lack of experience he might see some opportunity to stop the other man, banked moderately and began to circle.
They watched, breathlessly.
The amphibian, under Jeff’s adroit piloting, side-slipped from under its danger.
“Good!” panted Dick, unaware that his voice carried through the tube to Larry, who nodded.
“He’s trying to climb higher,” added Dick.
“But he can’t outclimb the biplane, unless—”
Larry breathed a prayer of thanksgiving. Sandy was all right, saved for the time being from danger of being driven down.
A bright idea struck Dick.
“Listen, Larry,” he said into his tube. “If we could fly level with the amphibian, I could use my flashlight to flick a message to Sandy, and tell him to lower the life preserver while we fly directly under his craft, until we catch it and pull it into our ship.”
Larry nodded.
With his flashlight flicking the dots and dashes of the Morse code to Sandy, Dick spelt out a message explaining his idea. Twice he flashed the message, got an O. K. from Sandy, and told Larry.
There were some preparations on the other skycraft, then Larry dropped the nose of his plane and went down a few feet. The amphibian flew over them, high enough so its hanging pontoons would not scrape their craft, and as the cockpits were low, it could drop fairly close.
Sandy leaned out, a doughnut of white came shaking and swinging at the end of a rope. Dick braced himself, safety belt snapped tight, arms extended upward. Larry held his ship at flying speed and level. Once an air shift dipped the amphibian dangerously low, but Larry saw it coming and dived ten feet, then leveled again. Once more they tried to jockey into position.
Dick saw the doughnut swing toward him, threw his head back to avoid the blow, but it struck his chest. With a grunt, his arms closed and he clung. Sandy, feeling the tug of the rope, let go.
Dick dragged in the rope to prevent it from flying back into the empennage, fouling the tail assembly—and they had the preserver.
Then Dick shouted a warning. Larry dived. Tommy was coming at them.
Larry sent his craft into a sharp dive. Tommy, trying to prevent the maneuver, came straight toward the spot they had occupied, but missed.
Now the clouds hid them. By use of his instruments he could keep on a level keel, Larry knew, and with the engine throttled off, they could not be traced by its roar.
Presently they sailed out into a clear area and Larry sighed thankfully. He watched for a landing field beside a lake shaped like a half-moon. That would tell him he could set down on the landing spot the millionaire had built before going West.
Then he saw it. They began to drop swiftly, coming ever closer to the field. And then they set down, safe and unmolested.
Before the chums were clear of the runway, Tommy set down his ship, tumbled out and let the woman with him—the yacht stewardess—get out as best she could. “What do you mean, double-crossing me?” screamed Tommy at detective Whiteside. “Why have you tried to get the emeralds after you promised me half of them?”
“The man has gone crazy,” said Whiteside.
“They are all in it together, Mr. Everdail,” Tommy shouted, turning toward the millionaire.
“What are you doing with that stewardess?” demanded Larry. “She joined you on the lawn when you came from behind the trees.”
“Be still,” cried Everdail. “We can thresh it out later. Right now let’s get those emeralds.”
Larry produced a knife, and Mr. Everdail slashed the life preserver to ribbons.
There was a gasp. The life preserver was empty.
Then everyone began to talk at once, as accusations flew back and forth.
“Boss, I want you to take a look at this-here stuff I brought from your house,” said Jeff, drawing a parcel from his pocket.
“Good night!” Sandy was amazed. “Jeff, that’s the family history of the Everdails, that I saw when I visited the farm boys and found out you and Mimi were married.”
“That-there is it,” agreed Jeff, taking several tintypes from an envelope. “Boss, read that history of your family and see if it makes it plain why anybody wanted to destroy your gems.”
In the light of a flare, Mr. Everdail perused the pages.
“As I live and breathe!” he exclaimed.
“Yeah,” grinned Jeff. “Thanks to Sandy for leaving the book there, and thanks to—a certain relative of yours for leaving a marker at the right place. Now, take a look at these pictures out of your family album. They are pictures of the man who originally got the emeralds in India, and his son. Whose face that you know is close to being the same?”
With the scream of a madman, Mr. Whiteside leaped to the side of the group.
“Yes!” he babbled. “Yes! I am the son of the branch of your family that originally had the emeralds. My grandfather, for spite against my father, willed them to your family. Those emeralds ought to be mine—and my sister’s”—here he gestured toward the stewardess.
“Yes!” cried Whiteside Everdail—as they now learned his name was—“I grew up hating Atley Everdail’s family. I enlisted in the flying corps, got into his esquadrille, made a buddy of him, won his trust!
“I worked into his confidence, and watched every chance to get the emeralds. My time came when his wife went to London. I had my sister—stewardess, she was—already on the yacht.
“I beat the yacht to London. With her help—forced by threats—I got into the hotel and destroyed the gems—I thought. But on the way back to my room I saw Captain Parks, and began to suspect. I compelled my sister to admit the truth. The real gems were safe.
“I came to America, made the hinged door to the hangar, rewired the switches to get light by day to prepare the amphibian.
“I hired Tommy Larsen—he didn’t know the truth at first. Then I saw Jeff was getting suspicious, changed my plans and got a seaplane. I even went with Atley to see my own plan carried out,” he screeched.
“But everything went wrong. The life preserver hid the gems. I knew that, and made my sister run off with the wrong preserver, that I took from Jeff’s airplane. I thought the right preserver was in the seaplane, but Tommy was ‘wise,’ and refused to do any more than watch me, and when my sister came to get the emeralds, he tried to prevent me from getting away with it. You can piece out the rest. You’ll never punish me! You’ll never—take me alive!”
Eluding them, he dashed straight down to where Jeff’s amphibian, its prop still turning, stood fifty feet from the end of the runway. Tumbling into the cockpit, he threw the throttle wide. Down the few feet the amphibian roared, gathering speed.
The rend and crash, the tear of metal, wood and fabric as the craft dashed against a tree, was followed by a shrill scream from the stewardess.
In one thing the fanatic prophesied truly. They did not take him alive. But still they did not know where the emeralds were!
Next morning the Sky Patrol, the millionaire and others took the train from camp to the harbor.
But although Mimi showed which she thought was the right belt—although they ripped apart every life preserver on the yacht—no jewels appeared.
“I’ve thought of every possible hiding place,” Sandy told his chums, “and the only thing I can see to do is—if they were in a life preserver at all—what do you say to trying this—”
He outlined a plan. So promising did it seem that both Dick and Larry agreed to it.
That night an alarm of fire, red glow, yellow and red flames, and suffocating smoke, terrified everyone.
Tracing the smoke to the galley, Mr. Everdail was astounded to find Dick and Larry struggling with a man in pajamas—he had rushed in, had seen—too late—the red flares, colored fire powder and smoke pots that burned in buckets, and had been unable to disguise the fact that he had dragged two ice trays from the refrigerator. They contained—green ice!
“As I live and breathe!” cried Mr. Everdail, inspecting a tray.
Quickly overpowered, their captive confessed. The chef had taken the emeralds from the life preserver and frozen them in ice cubes of a deep emerald-green dye. These he easily preserved during the short times the trays were needed for other cubes, by putting them into one of the deep vegetable trays used in the refrigerating system.
That was how the chums were misled the night of Sandy’s birthday party. The trays had been emptied when they looked, and because the trays had just been used for tinted ice and were logically empty, they were fooled.
“But I was a coward—my conscience bothered me,” the chef admitted. “I wanted to return ’em, I wanted to take ’em. So, now—I’m glad I only kept them for you!”
“Well, Sky Patrol,” said Jeff as the boys pocketed their reward checks, “the sole of that-there right foot of mine itches. That means I’m to go into a new business and prosper—with the help of my Sky Patrol and Ground Crew. How about it?”
“drop a signal flare,” urged Sandy. “We’ll come a-flying!”
And that was settled!
The End