Sally smilingly passed him the last. She left the top of the basket open. The pistol that had been there was gone. Then Sally’s eyes met Joe’s and she was aware that his three friends had not come here merely to crash a picnic. But she took it in stride. It was an additional reason for Joe to approve of Sally.
“Me,” said the Chief largely, “I’m goin’ to swim. I haven’t had any more water around me than a shower bath for so long that I crave to soak and splash. I’ll go yonder and dunk myself.”
He wandered off, taking bites from the sandwich as he went. He vanished. Haney leaned back against a sapling, his eyes roving about the shoreline and the rocks and brush behind it.
Mike was talking in his crackling, high-pitched voice.
“But just the same it’s crazy! Fighting sabotage when we little guys could take over in a week and make sabotage just plain foolish! We could do the whole job while the saboteurs weren’t looking!”
Sally said with interest: “Have you got the figures? Were they ever passed on?”
“I spent a month’s pay once,” said Mike sardonically, “hiring a math shark to go over them. He found one mistake. It raised the margin of what we could do!”
Sally answered: “Joe! Listen to this! Mike says he has the real answer to sabotage, and, in a way, to space travel! Listen!”
Joe dropped to the ground.
“Shoot it,” he said.