Although he was the central figure in an unusual situation, Sandy was more puzzled than enlightened by its surprising development.

A footrace against a flying ship was novel enough; but the maneuver of the amphibian was still more strange. It was baffling to Sandy.

Sandy gave up the race very quickly.

Hearing the approach of an aircraft he sought concealment under roadside trees, continuing his steady trot. His heart sank as he identified the amphibian making its swinging oval from water to land and around the fairway and back.

“I can’t make it,” Sandy slowed. “It’s all off!”

He knew that it was safe for him to leave his shelter. The “phib” was past him in its zooming return from the golf course.

“Now we’ll never know what they found, or if they found anything in the swamp,” he told himself dejectedly.
221

Then his attention was fixed and his mind became mystified.

“That’s their crate, all righty,” he muttered. “But—they’re not landing on the estate. I suppose they’ve come to see that Jeff’s ’plane was safe. Now they’ll go on to Connecticut and we are defeated.”

He came out onto the road, walking with bent head as soon as he had caught his breath again.

For a moody few minutes he considered the wisdom of rejoining his chums.

“No,” he decided. “When I don’t join them they’ll come over to the estate. It might be a good idea to go on to the landing field and see if the amphibian dropped off anything with a small parachute.”

He pursued his way without haste. While he had been divesting himself of his coat Larry had urged the caretaker to go on to his duties.

“I’ll go on!” Sandy murmured more cheerfully. “I’ll have a clear half hour to myself. Maybe—without anybody talking and disturbing me—I might think out some answer to all the queer things that have happened.”
222

The failure of the amphibian to return to its home field he disposed of by deciding that its pilot meant to take something to some rendezvous in Connecticut, the one, no doubt, the hydroplane boat had made for.

The thing that came into his mind and stuck there, offering neither explanations nor a solution was the mystery of how that man had disappeared out of the hangar on their first visit.

“I’d like to find out how the ‘ghost’ gets in and out again,” he reflected.

Deep in the problem he looked up at a sound.

To his surprise, astonishing him so much that he stopped in the middle of a stride, the lodgekeeper’s gate of an estate he was passing opened suddenly and Sandy found himself staring at the last person in the world he expected to meet.

Facing him with a grin was Jeff!

“Hello, buddy,” the pilot said, without any show of dismay.

“Why—uh—hello, Jeff!”

“On your way to solve that-there spook business?”

“I—” Sandy made up his mind to see if he could startle Jeff into a change of expression and changed his stammering indecision into a cool retort:

“I—met the estate caretaker in the village. He asked me to run on ahead and tell you—and Mr. Whiteside—” Sandy watched, “—he could not find a Six-B slotted bolt anywhere!”
223

“Oh, couldn’t he?”

Jeff did not change a muscle of his face.

“Sorry he had all the trouble. We got the ‘phib’ engine going and I took Whiteside off on a little private matter in that.”

“Have you brought him back?”

“No. Set down in the little inlet, yonder.” He waved toward the shoreline concealed beyond the estate shrubbery. “It was closer to my own crate—it’s stalled yonder in the golf course.”

“Oh!”

Yes—stalled! Sandy repressed a taunt and pretended to accept the false statement.

“I hear Larry’s been getting instruction off that-there Tom Larsen,” Jeff turned suddenly on Sandy.

“Yes. Mr. Whiteside paid for it.”

It would do no harm, Sandy thought, to let Jeff know that his fellow conspirator, if that was Mr. Whiteside’s real standing, was not playing fair. “When people who may be wicked turn against each other, we learn a lot,” Sandy decided.

He f............