[CHAPTER XVII]
THE BIRD OF DEATH
Captain Bassett’s yacht-like schooner did not sail that night. Long after the camp fire of the spongers on the beach had fallen into a glow, the Englishman and Andy were in talk in the owner’s cabin. On the chart before them the compasses were often in play between a dot marked “Timbado Key” and the unnamed indentation in a long island, where the boy had written in pencil “Palm Tree Cove.”
At seven o’clock the next morning, two of the black men had brought up the unloaded can of gasoline. Andy had been taken ashore to the Pelican, two of the more intelligent spongers had been detailed to assist him, and the schooner was heading out of the cove, its owner on the after deck waving his Panama to the boy on shore.
A box of cloth, screws, wire, a hammer and saw, candles, tin pans, and three bamboo fishing poles had been sent ashore with the young aviator. Before the schooner had rounded the point and laid a course to the west, the operator of the aeroplane was busy. His shirt sleeves rolled up, barefooted and hatless, the boy did not seem to mind the semi-tropic sun. After a solitary luncheon he was at his task again. At three o’clock he paused—the Pelican a weird and picturesque sight, her tanks newly filled, her oil cups freshly primed. Whatever her new mission, she was undoubtedly ready for another flight.
Andy’s fishermen assistants viewed the altered machine with silent awe. When they had helped to wheel it into an advantageous location for a new start and had been dismissed, they hurried away, and the boy was alone. From his actions, the hours were dragging. Four and five o’clock passed with no signs of a new flight. The impatient Andy made constant references to the sun and his watch, with now and then little alterations in the aeroplane’s new equipment.
Frequently the boy also consulted a slip of paper.
“North, northwest,” he would repeat, “and twenty-five miles. At a minute and a half a mile, that’s thirty-seven and one-half minutes.”
Thirty-eight minutes before Captain Bassett’s calculation of sundown, at 6:35 P.M., the eager boy at last sprang into his seat, set his brake, turned on his power, and in thirty seconds the low-hanging palm leaves behind him, fluttering before his propellers, the now picturesque Pelican was skimming over the wide reach of Palm Tree Cove.
At one o’clock that afternoon Captain Bassett’s schooner was tacking off Timbado Key. When it dropped anchor off the makeshift of a beach village that its navigator had visited six years before, a few blacks emerged from the hovels. But no one on the schooner came ashore, and in the boat there were no signs of activity. The white-costumed Englishman sat and smoked under the awning. By mid-afternoon the beach was thick with a curious group.
When the sun was low in the west, a few minutes before seven o’clock, a small boat shot out from the idle, anchored schooner. As it grounded on the beach, the semi-savage blacks who had watched the strange boat all afternoon, moved forward. Captain Bassett, in spotless white, sprang ashore. He paused only to light a fresh cigar, and then, ignoring the motley straggling group, he walked quickly to the steps leading to the plateau.