"That sounds as if you had some trouble believing it?" chuckled Frank.
"Well, considering what I saw myself, I'd have to know the name of this party first, before I'd believe anything he said," Andy went on.
"Oh! You know him, alright; fact is, we were speaking of the same not a great while back," Frank observed, quietly.
"Don't make me start in guessing, Frank, because we've been talking of a dozen people; but tell me right out who it is," Andy pleaded.
"The pilot of the Mermaid, Andy!"
"Gee! Do you mean Todd Pemberton?" exclaimed the other.
"Just him and no one else. Why, he was that anxious to let the police know he had seen an aeroplane steering away straight into the southwest early this morning, that as soon as he warped his boat to the wharf, Todd, like a public-spirited citizen, hiked away for Headquarters as fast as he could run, hardly waiting long enough to understand about the bank being robbed, and Percy's biplane being used by the thieves as a means of making a quick get-away."
Andy turned his head and looked in his cousin's face.
"Public-spirited citizen go hang!" he said, contemptuously. "After what we saw, Frank, it's easy for us to understand just what it was made Todd want the police to do all their hunting away off in the southwest."
"Yes, what do you think was his object?" asked Frank, as he held the aeroplane just about five hundred feet above the level ground, covered by forests, as in most places around to the north of Bloomsbury, though occasionally they ran across farms that looked like oases in the dessert.