“Well, that’s a horse on me, Freddy,” he was eventually forced to admit sadly. “Sorry, Freddy. I guess he put one over on me and sneaked over to some other of these clouds. The darned plane is so small you could hide it under your hat.”
“Anyway, the venture had a promise of excitement,” Freddy grunted. “What now? I don’t think there’s any sense hunting around for the blighter. We could run out of gas trying to find him in all these clouds. Just our blasted unlucky day, Dave, I’m afraid.”
“It isn’t over yet!” Dawson grated, and banked the Vultee westward. “I’m going to have another look at those Albuquerque Cays. I—I refuse to give them up as a lost cause. I swear they’re right in the middle of this confounded mystery.”
With a savage nod for emphasis, Dawson sent the attack bomber rocketing back toward the short chain of green and brown islands sticking up out of the blue water. He was still half a mile from the most southern one when suddenly Freddy Farmer’s hand came crashing down on his shoulder, and the English youth’s voice cried out wildly in his ears.
“On this side of that first island, Dave! To the right! That strip of beach. There’s a crashed plane there. Can you see it? Its tail is sticking up out of the sand. And, I say! There’s something white on the beach. It looks like a letter—the letter H! What in the world is that supposed to mean?”
Dave was too excited to speak for a moment. He had picked out the wreck of the plane on the beach, and the big letter “H” on the sand close to it.
“That’s H for help!” he cried. “The pilot of that job must be still alive. Crashed and got marooned. And, Freddy! Unless I’m nuts, that broken off tail sticking up is the tail of a Vultee. Holy smoke! We must be blind not to have seen it before.”
“Worse than that!” Freddy shouted. “But I’d almost swear it wasn’t there. That’s impossible, of course. But I don’t see how we could have missed it. I—”
The English youth cut himself off short, and both of them stared down at the tattered figure of a man who came stumbling out of the thick underbrush waving both hands in a beseeching gesture.
“That settles it!” Dave cried. “That fellow does need help. And we’re going to give it to him.”