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.
156

“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.”
157

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............