“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.”