"Aren't you doing a thing to find them, Captain?" she demanded, harshly.
"I was thinking about it," he replied. "But after all, they've only been gone two days——"
"You don't know my niece!" interrupted the unhappy woman. "Linda always wires or telephones me every day, when she goes on these flying trips. She doesn't forget. It's because she can't—she has been injured or killed!"
"I hope not," he replied. "But I will send a plane over the Okefenokee Swamp tomorrow, Miss Carlton," he promised.
The two women gazed at each other in helpless dismay at the conclusion of this conversation. What could they possibly do, aside from informing the newspapers—a decision which they carried out immediately.
Accordingly, on June twenty-ninth, every newspaper in the country stated the fact that Linda Carlton, the famous aviatrix who had flown to Paris alone, was missing again—somewhere in Georgia—probably in the Okefenokee Swamp, with a chum, Miss Dorothy Crowley of Spring City, who was also a pilot.
The unhappy news instantly produced the effect which Miss Carlton hoped it would accomplish. It aroused no fewer than five searching parties, all bent upon locating these two popular girls.
Captain Magee's men were the first to go. Summoning Sergeant Worth, he commandeered a plane from the airport, and directed the pilot to fly over the swamp, searching from the air by means of spyglasses.
The second party was composed of the girls' fathers, both of whom were in New York City at the time. Mr. Crowley telephoned Mr. Carlton, and after sending a wire to their families, they boarded a Florida train together.
The third volunteers were two young men at Green Falls, two college boys who considered Linda and Dot their special girl-friends, though neither of them was engaged, Jim Valier and Ralph Clavering heard the sad news at the out-door pool at Green Falls, just as they were about to join a group of young people for a swim. Kitty Hulbert, Ralph's married sister, read the head-lines aloud.