CHAPTER VII THE SWAMP GIVES UP A CLUE

Two courses were offered to the Sky Patrol with Jeff.

“We can try to drop down into the fog,” called Larry to Dick as their pilot, with closed throttle, nosed down to get closer to the scene of the tragedy.

“But we can’t set down or do anything—and we can’t see much for the fog,” objected Dick. “I think we ought to go back and drop a note onto the yacht, telling the people to come here in a boat.”

Larry agreed with this sensible suggestion and Dick, scribbling a note, passed it to Sandy. After a glance the younger of the trio gave it to Jeff. The pilot nodded when he read it.

Again the engine roared as they swung around, laying a course to take them above the rolling mist, toward the end of the island around which—or beyond which—the yacht should be cruising or waiting.
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“It will be hard to find the yacht in this fog,” Sandy mused, but as they flew along he, with the others, scanned the low clouds for some open rift through which to catch a possible glimpse of the water craft. A slantwise gust of wind crossed the cockpits, giving them new hope. If a breeze came to blow aside the mist they might have better chances to see the yacht.

In steadily increasing force, and gradually coming oftener, the puffs of moving air increased their confidence.

The fog was thinning under them, blowing aside, swirling, shifting.

With the breeze from the new direction, as they steadily got closer to the end of the island, coming over a spot where a break in the cloud showed brown-yellow sand and rushing white surf beyond the wide level beach, Sandy’s alert eyes caught sight of something for an instant. Prodding Jeff, he indicated the object.

As Jeff swooped lower, inspecting, Dick caught a good glimpse of the tilted, quiet focus of Sandy’s gesture.

“There’s the amphibian,” Dick muttered. “Stranded—cracked up, maybe. But—if we could get down and land, we could use her, two of us could, to go to the swamp and see what’s there—before anybody else gets to the life preserver the jewels must have been tied to.”
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He passed forward, through Sandy, a note.

Jeff agreed, made his bank and turn, as Sandy saw the drift of a plume of smoke on the horizon, to get into the wind.

Coming back, dropped low, Jeff scanned the beach.

“It looks safe for a landing—pretty solid beach,” Larry concluded, and evidently Jeff felt the same way for he climbed in his turning bank, got the wind right and came down, using his engine with partly opened throttle to help him settle gradually until the landing wheels touched when the tail dropped smartly, the gun was cut, and the sand, fairly level and reasonably well-packed, dragged them to a stop.

Hurriedly the youthful Sky Patrol tumbled onto the sand, digging cotton plugs out of their ears now that the roar of the motor no longer made them essential.

“It’s the amphibian, and no mistake!” Larry cried, running down the beach toward the titled craft.

“If she isn’t damaged,” he told Dick, “you and Jeff, or Jeff and I could fly to the swamp in her.”
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“You go.” Dick was generous to the friend he admired, and who was almost a year older. “It would need a cool, quick head to handle whatever you might find in the swamp. You go.”

That also was Sandy’s opinion when, after a rapid inspection, they agreed with Jeff that the amphibian, set down with only a strained tail skid and a burst tire in the landing wheel gear, was usable.

“But there’s no gas,” objected Larry, noting the indicator in the control cockpit. “See, the meter says zero!”

“It was that way when I looked before,” Sandy said. “That was why I didn’t think anybody meant to use it——”

“Easy to fool you on that,” Jeff declared. “It’s been disconnected. I wouldn’t be surprised if that-there tank wasn’t nearly half full. They had it all fixed and ready——”

“Let’s go, then,” urged Larry. “Dick, look over the pontoons for strains, will you? She may have struck one of them—she has tipped over part way, maybe hit one of the pontoons.”
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Dick, examining with the thoroughness of an expert, with Jeff’s and his chum’s life perhaps depending on his care, stated that he saw no damage to the waterproofed coverings of the water supports. Declaring that they would stand by and watch the airplane, Sandy and Dick watched Larry and Jeff get settled, Dick spun the propeller to pump gas into the still heated cylinders, Jeff gave the “switch-on—contact!” call, Dick, pulling down on the “prop,” sprang aside to avoid its flailing blades, and the amphibian’s engine took up its roar.

Acting as a ground crew, Dick righted the craft by thrusting up the wing which was evidently not seriously damaged, while Sandy, as the motor went into its full-throated drone, shook the tail to lift the skid out of the clogging sand. His eyes shielded from the sand, blasted back by the propeller wash, he leaped sidewise and backward as the elevators lifted the tail and the amphibian shook itself in its forward lunge, lifted, flew within two inches of the sand, and then began to roar skyward.

“He’s drawing up the wheels, now,” Sandy called to Dick.

“They won’t be any good, with that burst tire—he’ll have to set down in water anyhow,” Dick explained. Sandy nodded.

Waving to his two watching comrades as they grew smaller to his peering eyes, Larry turned his attention to the work of scanning, from the forward place, all the indented shore line, north, that the mist had uncovered.
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To their left, as they sped on, the lighthouse poked its tower out of the drifting, dispelling fog.

Soon Jeff dropped low, diminished the throb of the engine, cruising while Larry kept watch.

“Yonder it is!” Larry’s hand gestured ahead and to the side.

Jeff, peering, located the wing of the seaplane, the fuselage half submerged in muddy channel ooze, the tail caught on the matted eel-grass.

In the mouth of a broad channel they touched water and ran out of momentum with the wings hovering over the grassy bank to either side.

“Now what?” demanded Jeff. “We can’t go in any closer.”

Already Larry had his coat and shoes off. Stripping them off, and with no one to observe, removing all his clothes, he lowered himself onto a pontoon and thence to the water, chilly but not too cold on the hot June afternoon.

Striking out with due care not to get caught by any submerged tangle of roots or grasses, Larry swam the forty feet.

“The pilot’s in his cockpit—” he gasped. “He’s—he isn’t——”
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“Get that collapsible boat on the back of the tank, there!” urged Jeff, “and come back for me.”

It took inexperienced Larry some time to open and inflate the tubular rubber device used for supporting survivors of any accident to the seaplane while afloat.

“He’s—I think he’s alive,” Jeff declared fifteen minutes later. “That’s a bad slam he’s had on the forehead, though.” He lifted the silent pilot’s bruised head, put a hand on his heart, nodded hopefully and bade Larry dash water in the man’s face.

The cold, salty liquid seemed at first to have no effect.

“He must have hit himself trying to get out,” Larry surmised.

Jeff shook his head.

“His parachute isn’t loosened or unfolded,” he responded, working to get the spark of life to awaken in the man he bent over. “No, Larry, from the looks of things—somebody hit him, while they were away up in the air, and jumped—with that life preserver.”

“Where is he now? If only I could get my hands on him. I wonder who it was?”

Jeff paid no attention to Larry’s natural anger and wonder.
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“He’s coming around—fella—who did this-here to you?”

The eyes fluttered open, the lips trembled.

Larry, clinging to a brace, his feet set on a strut, bent closer.

“What happened? Who done this?” repeated Jeff.

The man, before he sank again into silence, uttered one word—or half a word:

“Gast—” he muttered.

“Gast—was it somebody named Gaston?” asked Jeff.

The man did not respond.

“Never mind,” Larry urged. “Can you get him into the boat, somehow, Jeff? You ought to land him at a hospital—or at the nearest airport. There’s a medical officer at every one—for crack-ups. Or, fly and telephone for help!”

“Would you be afraid to stay here if I take him to an airport?”

“No!” declared Larry, stoutly.

Without further words or conscious movements from the silent pilot they managed to get him unhooked from his belt and parachute harness, to lower him, precariously limp, into the rubber boat, which Larry held onto as Jeff, half supporting his inert co-pilot, propelled it to their own craft.
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As they moved slowly along Larry, fending off a clump of tough grass into which the breeze sought to drift their rubber shell, caught sight of something dimly white, far in among the muddy grass roots.

He left his support, swam across the smaller channel, carefully, and secured the life preserver which had dropped into a heavy clump of the grass and then had floated free of the mud, held only by the end of a tangled string—and the skin of an empty, oilskin pouch, torn and ripped to tatters, that hung to the cord.

When Larry rejoined Jeff, he flung the life preserver into the space behind the control seat of the amphibian, leaving it there without comment as he helped Jeff to lift and drop the still unconscious man into his own forward place.

Then, pushing off in the rubber boat, he sat still, his dry clothes in a compact bundle in the boat thwarts, while Jeff let the wind and tide-run carry his amphibian out of the channel to where he could get sea space for a start, to get the amphibian pontoons “on the step” from which, with his silent cargo of human tragedy, Jeff lifted into air and went out of sight, southbound.

Sitting until he dried, Larry donned his garments.
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“Gast—” he murmured. “Gast——”

Had he heard any name around the airports like Gaston?

“Well,” he reflected, “its something, now, anyway. We can look for a Frenchman—and learn if there’s one named Gaston.”

He sculled back to get under the shading, up-tilted wing of the seaplane, studying what he saw of its half submerged after place.

“Glory-gosh!” he exclaimed, staring.

There, neatly arranged, was the row of chewed bits of gum!