“A very fine thing, Dick.” Miss Serena smiled gently. “Now you had better go and lie down, and I’ll have the maid bring up some hot cocoa and something for you to eat.”
“That is just what I need, ma’am,” Sandy told her.
“I think we’d better get this crate into the hangar—we’ll get the gardener and the caretaker and push it in,” Dick suggested. “I always get over a scare quicker if I’m busy doing something to take my mind away from it.”
“Very well,” the lady agreed. “I shall have a good lunch ready when you come in.”
She started away, but turned back.
“What caused the—the—trouble?”
“Jeff calls it a ‘jinx’—a ‘hoodoo’,” responded Dick.
“Jeff is silly,” she said with some annoyance. “There are no such things.”
“I don’t know—” Larry took up the argument. “It is not usual for a cable to jam. It might break, but one shouldn’t get caught.”
“I see. Don’t think for a moment, Lawrence, that it was caused by anything but Jeff’s carelessness, because of his fears.”
She went to get their lunch ordered.
“Did I play up to you all right?” Larry asked. “I saw you didn’t want to explain anything.” Dick nodded.
“You did just what I wanted,” he said. “Let’s get the airplane in. Then we can talk.”
With others of the new group of servants they took the craft to its place.
As soon as they were alone, Dick climbed up onto the back of the fuselage, dived down into the small space, while Larry waited an agreed signal, in the after seat, and pulled his chum out.
“Great snakes!” cried Sandy, then lowering his voice. “How did that get there?”
Dick, emerging from the fuselage working compartment, displayed a large, fat, round object.
“The life preserver—from the yacht!” gasped Larry.
“How did it get there?” repeated Sandy, stunned.
“Jeff!” said Dick, briefly.
“Oh, no!” declared Larry. “Jeff is a good pilot. He’d never leave anything that could shift about and cause trouble.”
“But how did it get there?” Sandy reiterated. “I thought——”
“We all thought it went back to the yacht,” Larry finished his sentence for him.
“It did,” said Dick, seriously. “I know that after Jeff brought it in, the caretaker in the hydroplane took it out—and I’ve seen it at the stern.”
“Well, this may not be the same one—we can easily find out.”
Larry hurried from the open hangar, followed by his two friends. At a trot they went through the grove and down the path, after Dick, dropping the life preserver onto the after seat, jumped down.
As soon as the yacht came in sight, they stared toward the stern.
“That’s queer,” observed Larry. “I see a life preserver hanging in its regular place. This must be another one!”
The one in the airplane, Dick argued, was “the one”—and the one on the yacht was a substitute.
“But why was it put there?” demanded Sandy.
Dick eyed him with surprise.
“Suspicions Sandy—asking that?” he teased.
“I’m trying not to suspect anybody. Instead of doing that I try to believe everybody’s innocent and nothing is wrong. I’m going to let you do the suspecting.”
“That’s turning the tables on you, Dick,” Larry grinned. Sobering again he turned back to Sandy.
“I think Dick is working out something we may be able to prove,” he argued. “I think I see his idea. Captain Parks was the only one who could open the cabin safe. He is a seaman, and he would know that a life preserver isn’t bothered with except if somebody is overboard or in some other emergency. Supposing that he meant to help some one in America to ‘get away with’ the emeralds——”
“He would tie them to a life preserver and throw them over where somebody he ‘expected’ could get them,” agreed Sandy, with surprising quietness. “Only—a woman threw the life preserver.”
Dick nodded. Sandy threw another clog into the nicely developed theory.
“Furthermore, Captain Parks was on the bridge at the time——”
That all fitted in, Dick asserted.
“I am working on the notion that Captain Parks agreed with somebody not on the yacht—to get the emeralds. But he made up his mind to get them all for himself!”
“So he hid them in the life preserver.” Sandy spoke without enthusiasm, making the deduction sound bored and commonplace, although it ought to have been a striking surprise, an exclamatory statement. It would have been, Larry thought to himself, if Sandy had made it. Was the youngest chum jealous of Dick, displeased because it was not his own discovery that led to the hiding place of the jewels—if they were right?
“You thought of the life preserver as a hiding place?” asked Dick.
Sandy nodded.
“Where else?” he argued. “Captain Parks couldn’t get a better or safer place, right in front of everybody and never noticed. If the life preserver was thrown into the sea—it would be recovered.”
“Doesn’t it get you excited?”
“No, Dick! Why should it? I thought of it. But I’m not telling all my ideas, any more. I’m not ‘peeved,’ but I mean to be able to prove this before I accuse anybody again.”
“We can prove it—come on!”
“No need,” declared Sandy. “I noticed while we were on the way to Maine that a new life preserver was on the stern of the yacht. I saw it hadn’t been cut and sewed up, so the emeralds couldn’t be in that—or in any other one on the yacht. And, when Dick made his discovery, just now, I examined the one he found for cuts and marks of being sewed up.”
“I didn’t notice any,” admitted Larry.
“Bang! Another theory gone up in smoke!” Dick was rueful.
“All the same,” Larry commented, “Jeff didn’t put the preserver in his fuselage, and Captain Parks could open his safe and no one else knew how, he declared! There are some things I can’t work out and I wish I could.”
“Let’s make whoever knows anything—er—let’s make them work it out for us,” suggested Dick. “Let’s bait a trap with the life preserver—leave it where it is, get Mr. Everdail to call everybody together, and we’ll tell what we found and what we think is in it—and see what we see.”
Eagerly Larry consented. Sandy nodded quietly.
Simple and clever, Dick’s plan appealed to Mr. Everdail.
His library, that evening, made Sandy think of a “mass meeting of creditors or stockholders who have been tricked.”
The room sheltered a mixed assembly. Jeff was there, and so was the seaplane pilot, Tommy Larsen, and his former “passenger” supposed to be a special agent from London.
Miss Serena, with the yacht stewardess, uneasy but clinging close to the older woman, made up the representatives of the ladies’ side, while Captain Parks, his chef, mate, engineer and their helpers and crew, with the caretaker and all the new servants, filled one end of the room.
“Now you know why there was so much excitement as the yacht came in,” Mr. Everdail completed a long speech in which he told the astonished gathering about the missing emeralds. “That is, those of you know who didn’t know before,” he added meaningly, and went on quickly. “I decided to tell you because somebody on that yacht was ‘in cahoots’ with somebody else, and if any of you know who it is, it will be worth ten thousand dollars to you to point out the right one and help me prove you’re right!”
“That will start something!” mused Larry as many exclaimed, and others looked startled at the disclosure of the large reward.
By agreement Mr. Everdail watched the sailors and servants to note the effect of his story. Sandy, without doing it openly, watched Jeff. Larry’s eyes covertly observed Tommy Larsen and his associate and Dick noted the action and expression of Captain Parks.
“There’s some one who knows something!” Larry decided as he saw the passenger of the cracked-up seaplane bend forward, intent, but without a trace of expression. He had the sort of face that can completely conceal its owner’s emotions.
“I’ve discovered that Captain Parks has a hand in this somehow,” Larry determined, as he saw the mariner’s eyes shift. Larry followed the swift, instantly changed direction of the seaman’s glance.
“He looked smack at the stewardess,” Larry added to himself.
Sandy’s watchfulness drew blank.
“Jeff didn’t turn a hair,” Sandy murmured under his breath. “He knew all about it, of course. But—just you wait, Jefferson-boy, till Mr. Everdail ‘springs’ the trap.”
As soon as the sensation created by the large offer was over, everybody looked suspiciously at his or her own neighbor.
No one spoke.
The millionaire waited a decent interval for someone to come forward, and Miss Serena finally broke the spell of silence by saying, quietly:
“You won’t find out anything by that, Atley.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” She spoke in harmony with her name, pronouncing her words serenely:
“Because—the person who threw the jewels off the Tramp—isn’t here—and wasn’t suspected or seen.”
“As I live and breathe!” The rich man rose, while Dick, Larry and Sandy almost bounced out of their chairs.
“Serena, explain that!” he added.
“It was your wife’s French maid—Mimi!” she said quietly.
“How do you know?”
“Did you see her?” broke in Sandy, astonished.
“I did not see her,” Miss Serena replied to Sandy while she answered the older man’s question in the same breath. “But I saw a glimpse of dress just afterward.” Her expression showed confident assurance.
“Why, Miss Serena!” Jeff was stunned. “I didn’t know you was one of these-here detectives.”
“I’m a woman and I use my eyes,” she responded quietly. “A woman needs only to catch a flash of a dress to identify it. Mimi’s maid’s outfit has a distinctive cap—and I saw her cap just as she turned into the after cabin—I was on the bridge. I went there immediately but she had gone out through the galley door and I could not locate her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” her cousin demanded.
“There was no need. She had taken only the imitations—the ones you found.”
“But she knew them,” objected Dick. “She wouldn’t throw over the wrong ones and she couldn’t get the right ones.”
“She threw over both sets!”
The Sky Patrol gasped in unison. So did all the others.
“But she couldn’t get the real ones!” persisted Dick.
“She did not know she was throwing them over!”
There was another chorus of amazed exclamations.
“Explain that,” commanded the millionaire sharply.
“She—did—not—know—that the real emeralds—had been—hidden—in the life preserver she used!”
“Who put the real ones there?” Larry spoke abruptly in the astonished silence.
He did not need to have her reply. Captain Parks was red and white by turns.
“I hid them to keep them secure!” he stammered, turning toward his employer. “I had no wish to take them. I felt—sure—nobody knew the combination of the cabin safe—but I couldn’t say that a clever man, some ‘Jimmy Valentine’ fellow, might not get in. So I decided to hide the real emeralds—and what was safer than a life preserver?”
While eyes were fixed on him, surprised, accusing, unbelieving, he spoke haltingly to his employer:
“I hope you’ll take my word for it, sir.”
The millionaire hesitated.
“I believe you!” Larry spoke earnestly, reassuringly. “It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
“But how did you get them into the life preserver?” asked Sandy.
“Took off part of the cover, cut the rubber, put them in, wrapped in oiled silk to make a tight pack, then used some rubber patching cement I keep for torn rubber coats or boot patching, and with a hot electric iron I vulcanized the rubber together and put back the covering.”
“Then there weren’t any stitches to be discovered!” exclaimed Dick.
“None!”
“Then we’re all right!” Larry leaped to his feet. “We can restore the jewels!”
“Certainly we can!” agreed Sandy. “And Mr. Everdail can telegraph his wife to have Mimi arrested——”
“And she will have to tell who was her partner,” added Dick.
“Now you had better go and get that life preserver, and we’ll cut it open,” suggested Mr. Everdail. “I guess it’s safe enough hidden in the tail of Jeff’s plane—” He was baiting their trap. “Don’t look so surprised, Jeff—that was what caused your ‘hoodooed’ crate to go out of control—but we don’t suspect you of putting it there!”
Sandy, Dick and Larry had left the room by the time he completed his sentence.
Reaching the hangar, with Mr. Everdail’s private key they opened the smaller door, and used a flashlight to locate, reach and climb to the tail of the airplane’s fuselage.
“Now—out comes—why!——”
Dick and Sandy saw Larry’s dazed face.
Instantly they knew the worst!
Into the waiting assemblage in the Everdail library plunged Sandy with a white, frightened face and his breath coming in gasps after his run.
“It’s—gone! Mr. Everdail—the life—preserver——”
“Gone? That can’t be!”
“It is, sir!”
“I don’t see how—” Mr. Everdail was thinking, as was Sandy, that with everyone whom they suspected, except the maid Miss Serena had accused, present in that room, the loss of the carefully hidden object must be impossible.
“When did you last see it, wherever you had it?” asked the man from London, cool and practical.
“Just before—the meeting here, sir!”
“It was—where?”
“We left it where Dick had discovered it—in the fuselage of Jeff’s airplane. One of us watched, taking turns, all afternoon. Just before we came in here we made sure it was all right, and Larry, who has the longest reach, pushed it in as far as he could get it and still be able to take it out again.”
“Could that girl, Mimi, have come back?” Jeff wondered.
“Whether she did or not,” the pilot, Tommy Larsen, jumped up, “if the life preserver was safe an hour ago, and gone now, it was taken during that hour. Maybe within the last few——”
“Yes—I think it was in the last few minutes!” Sandy declared. “We didn’t talk about the emeralds being hidden in it until almost the last thing before we went to fetch it here.”
“Let’s search the estate!” urged the pilot.
“Come on, everybody—spread out—” cried Jeff. “We’ll get that-there girl——”
“Wait!” begged Sandy. “Everybody will get mixed up and hunt in the same places. We ought to organize——”
“Sound common sense,” commented Miss Serena. “But if you ask——”
Sandy guessed that she would have given her opinion, if asked, that the search was useless.
She was given no time for the comment. Leaving her with the white-faced stewardess and the pilot, whose injuries prevented him from being of much use due to his evident weakness, the others, under Mr. Everdail, were grouped into parties. Given a definite territory, each set out, one group to search the grove under Jeff’s leadership, another to cover the shore section, boathouse and boats, with Captain Parks and his men in the party. Others, under the mate and engineer, divided the rest of the searchers to beat the further and less cultivated woods on the estate and to walk the roads, while Miss Serena gladly agreed to telephone to outlying estates, and to the nearby town to have a watch kept for any unknown person, woman or man.
“Where’s Larry—and Dick?” asked Jeff, as Sandy ran beside him.
“Searching the hangar——”
“But it was locked and all doors down,” Jeff grunted. “Why waste time there?”
“I guess we thought, just at first, somebody might have hidden the preserver somewhere—we thought we saw somebody in the hangar the day the mystery started, but we found no one, so Dick thought——”
“Well, go tell them to come and help me in the grove. Don’t waste time there!”
Sandy separated from the superstitious one, as the latter rushed among the trees, muttering that some omen had warned him of trouble.
As the beaters separated, and widened the circle of their search, the sounds of calls, shouts, voices identifying one another grew fainter.
Sandy, reaching his comrades, compared notes.
“They’ve organized and started,” Sandy reported. “What have you two found?”
“Nothing,” Dick said dejectedly. “We ought not to have left that thing unguarded.”
“Not with a fortune in it,” agreed Larry. “But we were so sure——”
“Whoever got it can’t be far off,” interrupted Dick. “No one but Miss Serena and Captain Parks—and we three—knew about the hiding place until the last part of the meeting.”
“Let’s lock up, here, and join Jeff,” suggested Sandy.
“Where is he?”
“In the grove, Dick.”
“All right,” Larry moved to the small door. “The spring lock’s set. The place is surrounded. Nobody’s in here—” They were outside as he made the last statement. “Slam the door and try it, Dick. All right. Come on, let’s find Jeff.”
The search took longer than they expected.
To all calls the thick grove gave back only echoes.
Dick, rounding a tree, stumbled.
“Larry—Sandy—come—quick!” He called his chums in a strained voice.
When they reached him, in the dying glow of the flashlight Dick trained on a body lying in a heap, they identified the man who had been warned by his gypsy fortune teller to “look out for a hidden enemy.” He was lying at full length in the mould and leaves.
“Jeff!” Dick knelt and lifted the man’s head.
“Huh!—uh—oh!”
Slowly, while they held their breath, understanding came into the dazed eyes, the breath was drawn in, and Jeff struggled to a half-reclining posture.
“What happened to you?” begged Sandy.
“The rest—oh, I’m sick!—I got a bang in the solar plexus—I sent the rest of the men out to the edge of—the woods—oh!—my stomach—to beat in towards me—when I come around this-here tree, somebody was waiting and poked me—oh!”—
“Then somebody is still close. How long ago?——”
“I don’t—know—I passed out——”
“Hey—everybody—yoo-hoo!” Larry cupped his hands and began to shout in various directions.
The crash and call of the beaters coming in began to grow louder.
Unexpectedly, from the water of the inlet, and yet in a muffled, unnatural tone, there came the sputtering roar of a motor.
“What’s that?” cried Dick.
“One of the airplanes—somebody’s in the hangar——”
“No, Sandy, it’s from the water.”
“But there’s no boat out—the only boat with an engine is the hydroplane——”
“The yacht tender’s tied to the wharf,” Dick reminded Larry.
They raced down the sloping woods path.
“Where’s the guard—where’s everybody?” Sandy shouted.
The men came running. They had scanned the place by the wharf, and, satisfied that no one lurked there and that the tender was secure, they had gone further along the inlet coast.
“No one’s in the tender!” Larry exclaimed.
“It’s the hydroplane, then!” Dick decided. “It’s coming from the water-dock inside the boathouse, now—there it is. Hey! You! Stop!”
Seamen, the mate, Pilot Tommy Larsen, servants, dashed up.
“What’s happened? What’s the excitement? The hydroplane—there it goes!”
Their shouts came in a chorus of helpless questions and suggestions.
“Man the yacht tender!” ordered Captain Parks. His men tumbled into it.
“That isn’t fast enough!” objected Pilot Larsen. “I’d fly that amphibian crate only—I’m too weak and dizzy——”
“Jeff’s hurt, too,” said Dick, desperately. “I guess they’ll get away with the emeralds!”
“Why can’t Larry fly the ‘phib’?” demanded Sandy.
“At night? I haven’t had any experience.”
“But Jeff could go along.” Dick took up the idea eagerly. “Couldn’t you, Jeff? And tell him what to do in an emergency!”
“Yes—sure I could! Not in the ‘phib’ because we don’t know how much gas—the gauge is out of whack—but we got the airplane ready this morning—if it wasn’t the night of the thirteenth I’d have said something about it long ago!”
“Forget about the thirteenth—remember the thirty emeralds!” cried Sandy. “Come on, all—help us get that crate out and started. It’s a flight for a fortune!” They took up the cry. Dick and Larry ran off.
Those of the servants and seamen who were not too excited by the escape of the hydroplane to hear, followed the Sky Patrol as they raced through the grove. Jeff, supported by Sandy and friends among the men, came more slowly, still unwell from the blow in a tender spot.
“Mr. Everdail could fly the crate if he was here—he’s an old war pilot,” said Larsen, but they did not wait to locate him. As soon as the engine was warmed, the instruments checked, in spite of the delay at cost of precious moments, Larry donned the Gossport helmet, Jeff got in behind him, Sandy and Dick, without waiting for invitations, snapped their belts—the engine roared—and they were off!
Larry was keyed up to a high tension; but he had no lack of confidence in himself. Night flying, of course, differed from daytime piloting. But Jeff was in the second seat, with the Gossport tube to his lips.
Sandy and Dick were in their places, ready to observe and to transmit signals by using the flashlamp—one flash, directed onto the dash before Jeff so it would not distract Larry, meant turn to the right, two meant a left turn, three quick flicks would tell of the discovery of the hydroplane.
Jeff was too upset to pilot; and since the morning adventure he had no second control stick; but he could give instructions.
“I see a light,” Sandy said as the airplane swung far out over the dark water. “A green light, but the hydroplane wouldn’t carry lights.”
As they swung in a banked turn to circle over the Sound, the green disappeared and its place was taken, as it seemed, by red.
“Dick!” Sandy turned and gestured, pointing.
“I see it!” Dick located the tiny light well below them.
“The hydroplane must have its electric running light switched on,” Sandy mused, unable to convey his idea, because Larry had the engine going full on.
“That must be the hydroplane,” Dick decided. “He—whoever is in it—is afraid to run without his lights.”
Three swift flicks of his own flash showed to Jeff.
“Larry, they’ve spotted that-there boat,” Jeff spoke through the tube to the young pilot. “Yep. More to the left. That’s it—both at the same time! Stick to the left, rudder, too. Good boy. Now the stick comes back to neutral. Hold her as she is—better cut down the throttle a little as we bank and turn to the left.”
Thus began their flight for a fortune!
From their cockpits Sandy and Dick watched the hydroplane. At cruising speed their airplane made nearly three miles to the hydroplane’s one. Its mysterious occupant must know that they were trailing him, but he held to a straight course so that his lights were never in a different place as their craft above swung to show its observers the red and then the green.
“He’s making straight for Greenwich, on the Connecticut side,” Dick decided, knowing a good deal about the Sound ports.
“How are you fixed?” Jeff spoke to their youthful pilot through his tube.
Briefly Larry swung his head, nodding.
“We’ll be getting tired of turning to the left all the time,” Jeff suggested. “Think you could follow a sort of zig-zag, flying slantwise across the course of that-there boat, then coming around an angle and flying slantways back to the other side?”
Larry nodded emphatically.
“Good! Here we go—to the right. Get your eye on that Fall River Liner, coming up the Sound—that’s about the point of our first leg.
“Now, touch of right rudder and right aileron—and stick back to neutral. There! She’s level. Keep moving stick and rudder a bit, steadily. Now she’s banked and turning. Neutralize! That’s the ticket.
“There! The nose is on that steamer. That’s it—don’t let her swing off that point for awhile—and watch that you don’t nose down—that’s right, back a bit on that-there stick, up she comes, stick back to neutral.”
Thus directed, and admonished, Larry managed to give the airplane a swinging, zig-zag course, so that its greater speed was used up in the longer legs of its slanted progress, and since the hydroplane did not try any tricks or change its path, the Sound was being crossed in the wake of the steamer by the boat and in a corkscrew path by its aerial bloodhound.
“I think I know what is going to happen,” Sandy decided, as they crossed the course of the hydroplane so that its two tiny colored beams showed at the same instant. “He’ll wait till we get closer in to the Connecticut shore line and then he’ll ‘douse the glim’ and leave us with nothing to watch.”
Bending forward Dick began to rummage in a compartment built in his section of the seating space.
He believed that he could outwit any effort to escape by taking advantage of the landing flares, attached to small parachutes, which Jeff carried as a precaution during his former night hops to the old estate.
“Better cut the gun and glide down a couple of hundred feet,” Larry heard Jeff’s voice in his earphones. “If he tries any tricks——”
“That’s queer!” Sandy exclaimed to himself, as he stared down and saw the small, swift boat open a vivid, glowing eye at the bow.
The helmsman had switched on its searchlight.
“What’s that for?” Dick wondered.
Jeff, warned by the trail of light on the water below, took a quick look.
“He must be looking for his landing!” Sandy called.
Larry, holding the airplane in a moderate glide, saw the beam glowing out beyond the airplane’s nose, felt that he was as low as he dared be with land ahead, and drew back on the stick to bring up the craft to a level keel, opening the throttle as the glide became a flat course about three hundred feet higher than the water.
“He’s swinging the boat out to open water again!” cried Sandy.
“There it goes around!” shouted Dick, unheard, excited, as the beam of the hydroplane swung in a wide arc from shore, heading once more back toward Long Island.
“He’s going back!” Sandy exulted. “We’ll get him!”
“Good boy,” Jeff spoke to Larry. “You made that turn without a hitch. With that searchlight to guide you, I don’t need to talk through this-here thing any more.”
Larry had no trouble following the boat with the white beam as a guide.
It puzzled Sandy, and he swung around to look questioningly back at Dick. The latter, unable to see his expression, but guessing his idea, shook his head.
“It’s time to find out what’s what!” he muttered.
As Larry banked and came around on a new slant across the hydroplane’s path, which seemed not so true to the straight line as it had been, Dick secured a parachute-equipped landing flare, sent it over safely past the wings, and watched the white glare light up the surface of the water.
To Larry’s disappointment, they were so far to one side and behind the hydroplane that the flare failed to disclose its occupant.
He held up a hand, and pointed ahead, then opened the throttle, came onto a straightaway course over the hydroplane, rapidly overhauled it and got well ahead. Then, cutting the gun and gliding, as it came up under them, he signaled, and Dick, waiting, ignited a second flare.
All four of the Sky Patrol members gasped as the light blazed out.
Larry looked back at his companions, amazedly.
“It’s—empty—nobody in it!” he cried.
“Somebody had to be in that hydroplane,” Sandy mused. “They were there to switch on the light, to turn the boat, and to set it on the new course!”
Quickly he peered to the side and back, downward at the water in the place where the first landing flare had settled into the water.
Just a little closer to their position, should have been the spot where the clever miscreant might have abandoned the boat.
Sooner than that, Sandy guessed, the unknown person could not have quit the hydroplane: otherwise the turning from shore would have continued and the hydroplane, instead of proceeding in a straight course away from land, would have swept in a wide circle, round and round.
“There’s no life preserver in the boat either—so that’s what the mystery man used to swim away with—Mr. Everdail’s jewels!” he added.
Straining his eyes, he peered, looking for a bobbing head, a round white object supporting a body, as the flare died. Dick, arguing in much the same fashion, stared from the other side of the fuselage and gave a shout of elation.
“There!”
His arm pointed.
Sandy prodded Jeff, and quickly the pilot, much recovered, gave Larry his instructions.
“Nose up—we’re getting too low. Right! Now a right bank—not too steep. Don’t get excited. That-there lad in the hydroplane headed her outbound and then took to the water. Now we’re heading in—steady with that-there rudder—don’t try to jam her around—now she’s all right. Level off and hold her as she is.”
Larry obeyed all instructions, doing the work as Jeff gave the order. Larry was rapidly growing sure of his ability.
He fought down the excitement that wanted to express itself in hasty manipulation of his controls and kept a steady hand and a cool brain.
Dick, scribbling hurriedly, passed a note to Sandy, who read it in the light of the flash, and then passed both paper and light to Jeff.
Dick, recalling a wide, spacious cement-floored parking space at a nearby bathing resort, had suggested “setting down” there. As he read the note Jeff shook his head.
“Dangerous trying to land there!” was the note Jeff passed back as Larry flew the airplane at just above stalling speed toward the shore. Dick agreed. After all, there might be automobiles in the parking lines, and the light might be bad for Larry. Even using a power-stall by which, with the engine going and a flat gliding angle, the airplane could settle gradually closer until it took the ground with hardly a jar, the maneuver would not be safe, Dick admitted.
“Here comes another ’plane!” Sandy called out, taking the flashlamp from Jeff again as the older pilot handed it back. “He’s flying right after us.”
They all located the drone of the other engine.
“Steady, Larry!” Jeff cautioned. “Hold as you are. That-there is our amphibian—and I reckon the boss is doing the control job.”
The amphibian, as they made out its pontoon understructure, came fairly close alongside. Its speed was almost identical with their own and at first all four occupants of the land crate wondered who was in it, and why.
“Signaling!” cried Larry, cutting the gun and turning to observe.
“All right, buddy,” admonished Jeff. “Stick to your job. Sandy or Dick will read the dots and dashes—if he’s using Morse code——”
“He is spelling out something with his flashlight,” Sandy decided, as he saw short flickers and longer dashes of light while the amphibian kept a course within close range but at safe wing distance.
“I’ve got it!” Dick passed forward his paper.
“‘G-i-v-e r-e-p-o-r-t,’” Sandy read, and as he handed Jeff the note, Sandy, using his own light, sent back the Morse code answer:
“Man swimming ashore with life belt.”
Then, with the beam directed in the path the mysterious unknown must have taken, he tried to show the occupant of the amphibian what he meant.
Evidently the endeavor succeeded, for the amphibian dived, and took to the water, while Larry, directed by Jeff, swept around in a circle out of range if the amphibian rose unexpectedly, but within visual range of its maneuvers.
Watching intently, his comrades saw that the amphibian kept on toward shore in a taxiing course on the water surface.
A shout greeted the advent of an automobile on a shore drive. As it swung around a curve, close to the water, its bright headlights fell in a sweeping line across the water—and picked out a round, white dot bobbing, vividly lit, in the rays.
The amphibian was headed directly for it.
It went close, just as the swinging lights swerved and were gone.
“Drop another flare!” shouted Larry.
Sandy caught and relayed the suggestion as they retained their swinging curve.
With the glare from the dropped light picking out things in sharp silhouette, they saw a man clamber out onto a pontoon and rescue the floating prize.
“Now, I wonder if that is Mr. Everdail—or if it’s somebody else?” thought Larry, correcting for a tendency of the nose to fall away.
“Whoever it is,” he concluded, “he can’t get away. He has the life preserver. But we have superior speed. And a good tankful of fuel.”
He glanced at the gauge to reassure himself, made an almost automatic correction of a wing tip, pushing up in a gust of air as he saw that his surmise about fuel was correct.
There was no need for the concern that all four felt for the moment.
As soon as it got under way again and took up its climb, the amphibian, coming to their level, showed its pilot holding up the life preserver, as the flare still settled toward the water. In the glow they recognized the triumphant, smiling millionaire.
The flight back to the landing field was without event. Larry made the landing first, and his companions tumbled out to join the waiting cluster of people while they all “took hold” to run the airplane out of the way so that the spiraling amphibian, its wheels down, could shoot the flare-lit field, and land.
“Here!” Mr. Everdail was triumphant as he threw the life preserver out of his cockpit to Larry. “As I live and breathe, that life preserver ought to be in a museum!” He grinned as he came to the ground. “That’s the flyingest life preserver I ever saw—first it goes joy-riding in a seaplane, then in the ‘phib’ and now it runs off on the Sound and comes riding back with me.”
“Let’s see what’s in that-there!” Jeff urged. “That’s most important, right now!”
The crowd trooped into the hangar, where Larry, at Jeff’s direction, switched on the overhead electric lamps.
Close around Mr. Everdail, Jeff, Captain Parks and Miss Serena, with the youthful Sky Patrol in their midst, the rest of the sailors, and most of the house servants gathered.
“Somebody give me a good knife,” ordered Mr. Everdail. “We’ll cut this thing to ribbons and get rid of all the suspense!”
Larry held out the round, heavy inflated “doughnut” as half a dozen pocket knives were unclasped and held out to the millionaire.
Taking the long-bladed one Sandy produced, Mr. Everdail advanced.
“Hold on, sir!” Captain Parks stepped forward.
“What’s the matter, Parks?”
“Son, turn that preserver over—let me see the other side.”
Surprised, Larry did as he asked.
They all saw the captain’s face assume an expression of disgust.
“That’s not the life preserver from the Tramp,” he grunted.
“What?”
“You know as well as I do, sir,” the yacht captain turned to his employer to answer his amazed cry, “you know that all the life preservers have the yacht’s name and port painted on them.”
“And that’s so, too,” said the mate, advancing and backing up his captain’s declaration.
“No, sirree!” Captain Parks stated. “That’s not the yacht property. It hasn’t any marks on it at all.”