CHAPTER XXVII SANDY’S DISCOVERY

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.
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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.”
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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!”
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“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 failed in his purpose.

“Tommy’s a good pilot,” Jeff admitted. “Well—I’ll be on my way. See you at the next air Derby!” Jeff grinned at his joke and walked on.
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So did Sandy.

While he hurried on, pausing only to collect a “wienie” and roll for lunch, Larry and Dick saw Jeff approach across the green of the fairway and took cover.

“He’s inspecting that airplane—I hope we didn’t leave any clues!” whispered Dick.

“He’s feeling the engine cowling—he wonders how the motor stayed so warm,” Larry retorted under his breath. “Now he’s looking around—get down low, Dick—well, he’s shaking his head. Now he’s in the cockpit. There! He caught the spark on a compression stroke—used his ‘booster magneto.’ There goes the engine.”

And, from the descent of Jeff, to give the ground careful inspection to the moment when he gave up his own baffling puzzle and took off, the youthful amateur pilot reported to Dick, from a spy-hole in the greenery.

“I wonder if Sandy knows Jeff has come on to take his airplane off,” Dick mused.

“It’s safe to go and see. If Mr. Whiteside is on the estate it will look as though we came out extra early. Besides, I’m hungrier than Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Come on!” Larry led the way from the golf course as he spoke.
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Sandy, long since safe at the hangar, began to work out his puzzle.

“Somebody was in this hangar the day Jeff made his pretended forced landing,” he told himself. “We saw him. It wasn’t a mistake. We all saw him and that proves he wasn’t just a trick of light in the hangar.”

More than that, he deduced, the man had vanished and yet, after he was gone, there had come that unexpected descent of the rolling door which had first made them think themselves trapped. Sandy argued, and with good common sense, that a ghost, in broad sunny daylight, was a silly way to account for the man. He also felt that it was equally unjust to credit the drop of the door to gravity. Friction drums are not designed to allow the ropes on them to slip, especially if there is no jolt or jar to shake them.

“But the switches that control the motor for the drum are right out on the wall in plain sight,” he told himself, moving over toward them, since the rolling door was left wide open when the amphibian was taken out. “Yes, here they all are—this one up for lifting the door, and down to drop it. And that switch was in the neutral—‘off’—position when we were first here—and it’s in neutral now.”
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He tapped the metal with the rubber end of his fountain pan and then shook its vulcanite grip-handle, to see if jarring it caused any possible particles of wire or of metal to make a contact.

“That’s not the way it’s done,” he decided.

He stood before the small switch panel, considering the problem.

His eyes, in that position, were almost on a level with the pole-pieces to which wires were joined to enable the switch metal, when thrust between the flat pole contacts, to make contact and complete the electrical circuit.

“Hm-m-m-m!” Sandy emitted a long, reflective exclamation.

“I never saw double wires—and twisted around each other, at that,” he remarked under his breath. “No—I’m not quite right. The two wires aren’t twisted around each other. One wire is twined around the other.”

He traced the wires down into the metal, asbestos-lined sheathing cable, and was still not enlightened about the discovery. It was not necessary to have two wires. One was heavy enough for the hundred-and-ten volt current that came in from the mains.

“That wire, being twined around the other, makes me think it was added—after the first one was put in,” he declared.
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“I wish I could trace it,” he added.

He tried.

Sandy, when he turned around, ten minutes later, knew all that the inside of the haunted hangar could reveal.

Another five minutes, concentrated close to a certain spot on the outside of the building, gave him his final clue.

But instead of waiting to tell his chums his great discovery, instead of keeping vigil, Sandy went away from there as fast as he could walk.

All afternoon he was as busy as a boy trying to keep ten tops spinning!