CHAPTER XIII—TOM SLADE, SCOUT
“Didn’t I tell you it had stripes?” Pee-wee shouted. “Wasn’t I right? Now you see! A scout is observant.”
“If he sees a suit of clothes he thinks it’s a zebra,” Charlie Seabury said.
Harry said, “Well, you weren’t so far wrong, Kiddo. The stripes weren’t on an animal; they were on a jail bird. I’d like to know where he flew away to. This is getting interesting. I knew that clothing was very high, but I didn’t think we’d find a suit as far up as this.”
“Maybe he was a murderer, hey?” Pee-wee whispered.
“We can only hope,” Brent said in that funny way. Then he said, “I’ve always felt that I’d like to be a murderer. I thought I was a real convict when I was held in jail three hours after speeding in my flivver. But when I look at this striped suit, I realize that after all I didn’t amount to much as a criminal. Let’s take a squint at those clothes, will you? It’s always been the dream of my young life to escape from jail by using a hair-pin or a manicure file or some kind of acid. I wonder how this fellow escaped.”
“I bet he escaped in the dead of night,” Pee-wee said.
“The question is, where is he?” Harry said.
“He went away in an airplane,” Tom Slade said, awful sober like, just as if Brent hadn’t been joking at all.
Good night, we all just stood there stark still, looking at him.
“What makes you think that?” Rossie wanted to know.
“No one laid that suit of clothes here,” Tom said; “it was dropped here. There aren’t any footprints. Out there in the flat part there are wheel marks from an airplane. I saw enough of those marks in France to know what they mean.”
“Tomasso Nobody Holmes, the boy detective!” I shouted.
“The airplane grazed the bushes when it went up,” he said; “that’s why some twigs are broken off. And part of one of the wings of the machine was torn, too. That’s because the airman didn’t have space enough to get away in. He took a big chance when he landed up here, that fellow.”
Harry just stood there drumming his fingers on one of the bushes and looking all around him and kind of thinking. Then he said, “What’s your idea, Tommy boy? Do you think a convict escaped and made his way up to the top of this jungle and that the airman alighted here for him by appointment?”
“The dog followed the scent out into the open, to the place where the wheel tracks are,” Tom said. “That’s where the man—that convict—got in. They didn’t have open space enough to start from there and they grazed the bushes. I guess it was pretty risky, the whole business. Anyway, they chucked the convict clothes out. This piece of silk is waxed; it’s part of the wing of a machine, all right.”
“Tomasso, you’re a wonder,” Rossie said; “no dog could follow a trail in the air.”
“There’s often a scent in the breeze,” Brent said.
“Didn’t I tell you it was a mystery?” Pee-wee shouted. “Didn’t I tell you it was a dark plot? As soon as I saw those clothes——”
“You thought they were a zebra,” Ralph Warner said; “a scout knows all the different kinds of animals.”
“You make me sick!” the kid shouted. “A convict is better than a zebra, isn’t he?”
“That’s a fine argument,” I told him.
“It’s logic,” the kid shouted.
“Well, let’s not complain,” Brent said; “a zebra would be a novelty, but a convict is not to be despised. We should be thankful for the convict, even though he isn’t here.”
“That’s the best part of it,” the kid shouted; “that makes the mystery. We’ve got to find him.”
We didn’t bother any more about the mystery then, because we wanted to send the signal and get started again, but you’ll see how that mystery popped up again and confounded us; I guess you know what confounded means, all right. It means the same as baffled, only I didn’t know whether baffled has two f’s in it or not. But, gee whiz, I used it anyway—I should worry.
So now while our friends are waiting for us down on the road (I got this sentence from Pee-wee), I’ll tell you about sending that signal. Signals are my middle name—signals and geography. But the thing I like best about school is lunch hour. I’m crazy about boating, too.