CHAPTER XXI THE SKY PATROL GIVES UP

At Sandy’s sensational announcement there was a stampede from the bridge. Soon after Dick and Larry raced through the cluttered and deserted dining saloon, it was invaded by the captain, the millionaire, Miss Serena and others, with Sandy in the lead.

“What did you discover, Dick?”

At Sandy’s cry his chum, as well as the oldest Sky Patrol, turned.

“Nothing!” said Dick.

He made a disgusted gesture toward the open front of the refrigerating box, to the four ice cube trays lying empty on the galley floor.

“They were as empty as our heads!” Larry was dispirited.
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“Sure they were!” the chef, who had observed their invasion of his cookery compartment with amazement, spoke up. “I had to use all of ’em to freeze the cubes for your dinner. No use to fill ’em again till I wash ’em up, so I left ’em out while I ‘defrost’ the box—cut off the current and let the box get warm enough to melt the frost that collects when you freeze a lot of cubes.”

He indicated the refrigerating unit which had heavy ice clinging wherever the chill had congealed the moisture from the evaporation of the water.

“Any other trays?” Mr. Everdail snapped.

“Only them, sir.” The chef threw all the compartments wide.

Food, ice-drip trays and vegetables in their dry-air receptacles, were all they discovered by a painstaking search. A glance into the “hydrator” packed with vegetables, crisp lettuce, long endive, and other varieties, a foray behind and under everything satisfied them that another clue had “gone West”—and left them very much out of favor.

No matter how closely they examined the built-in box, with its glossy enamel and bright, aluminum trays, nothing except food and drinkables in bottles revealed themselves.

And that ended it!

“I thought that was how it would turn out,” Jeff, coming from the after deck, declared.
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“I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” the yacht owner grumbled. “I ought to have known better than to trust three young men under seventeen to solve such a mystery.”

He reflected for a moment and then spoke his final word.

“I think I shall land you at a Brooklyn wharf, boys, and let you go home.”

“See what Friday, the thirteenth, does for you?” Jeff said.

Neither of the chums had a word to answer.

“The date has nothing to do with it,” Mr. Everdail snapped. “It’s their lack of self-control and experience.” He turned and stalked out of the galley and after him, sorry for the three members of the disbanded Sky Patrol, Jeff moved.

“Sorry, buddies,” he said, shaking hands at the pier to which the yacht tied up briefly. “Don’t let it stand between your coming out to that-there new airport once in awhile to see me. I guess if Atley is through with you he’ll be done with my crate too, so maybe we’ll meet up one of these days soon. If we do, and I have the money for gas and oil, Larry, you get some more flying instruction. You may not be a crackerjack detective, but when it comes to handling that-there crate, you rate mighty good.”
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He said a pleasant word to each of the other two, added a friendly clap on the arm and, with Mr. Everdail saying a brief, if not very angry farewell, the Sky Patrol quit its service, finished its air work and took to its feet.

Explanations at home accounted for the termination of their stay, which had been arranged by telephone at the beginning; and it seemed to them that the Everdail Emerald mystery was, as Dick dolefully said, “a closed book without any last pages.”

So despondent was Larry at his failure as a sleuth that he did not like to discuss their adventures with his chums.

His depression was more because his air training was over than from a real sense of failure. To Larry, one only failed when one failed to do his best—and that he had not failed in.

As a week went by Dick saw something to laugh about in their wild theories, their almost fantastic deductions. He found an old stenographers’ note book and jotted down, in ludicrous terms, the many clues and suspicious incidents they had encountered.

But Sandy was really glum.

To Sandy, the fault for their dismal failure lay at his own door.
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“If I hadn’t gone off ‘half-cocked’,” he told his comrades, “maybe we would have seen something or somebody really worth following up.”

He made a vigorous mental resolve never to be caught in such a trap again.

That very afternoon he passed a news stand and was chained in his tracks by a small headline in black type at one corner of a paper, in a “box,” or enclosure of ruled lines that set it off from the other news.

“Take a look at this!” he hailed Larry as the latter sat on Dick’s porch, whittling on the tiny struts of a model airplane.

Both chums read the box he thrust under their eyes.

“Ghost Again Walks In Haunted Hangar.”

Under that heading the story reminded readers that the Everdail estate had been haunted several weeks before according to report.

The millionaire, it went on, coming East to meet his wife, returning on their yacht from Europe, had investigated the uncanny events reported to him by his caretaker and others.

He had learned nothing, the reporter had gleaned from the caretaker of the deserted estate.
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However, it ended, as soon as Mr. Everdail had sailed on the yacht to join his wife at their lakeside camp in Maine, uncanny light, odd noises and other strange things had become evident again, as an excited local correspondent had notified the paper. Reporters, searching, and watching, had found nothing so far but the public would be informed as soon as they discovered the secret.

“What do you think of that?” Larry looked up.

“I don’t know what to think,” Dick admitted. “No ghost does those things. A real person has some reason for doing them. Who? And why?”

“The only way we’ll find out is by going there, at night, and watching,” Larry declared.

“Not for me,” Sandy said, surprising his chums. “We were ‘kicked out’ once. If we were to be caught on the place we’d be trespassers—and if the clever news reporters are watching and don’t find anything, how can we?”

“I’m going to be too busy earning money to finish my flying lessons to bother, anyway,” Larry decided.

“Still—” Dick began, and then, looking down the street, he became alert.

“Larry! Sandy! Look who’s coming. That’s the man who flew in the ‘phib’ with Mr. Everdail—the day the yacht came in!”

“It is!” agreed Larry. “He’s coming here. I wonder what for!”