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?”
147

“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.
148

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!”
149

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.
150

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 b............