The aviator had appeared suddenly, coming down, through a cloud, as Scott repeated the tale told him by an old man who earned his meagre living with a clam-hoe and bucket; at the same instant another ship, diving swiftly in apparent oblivion of the first, came into view.
“It must have happened in the flick of an eyelid,” Scott went on. “As old Ike tells it, he heard the engines, looked up, saw one ship for a split second, saw the other, and then—saw them come together!”
“Oh!” exclaimed Garry, “collided, did they!” Scott completed his story quickly, after admitting that Garry had diagnosed the accidental smash correctly.
“Right-o! And they never found one of the ships. It must have gone down in Devil’s Sink.” He referred to a portion of the marsh either of the quicksand bottom sort or very similar in the softness of its muddy shallows. “And—-”
“That’s—why they found—a skeleton, there!” Chick shivered as he spoke in a hushed voice.
“Maybe.”
“But—” Don objected, “what connection is there between an accident years ago and the excitement that has gotten into some of the newspapers and made a reporter call our new development ‘Mystery Airport?’”
“Ever read the ‘Proceedings’ and other books of the Society for Psychical Research?” Scott questioned in turn.
“I saw some of them in a bookstore,” Garry admitted. “They were too dull and prosy for me. Just old stories collected by scientific men who were trying to find out whether ghosts existed or not.”
“What did they decide?” Chick spoke eagerly.