“If you mean that anything was found, you know as well as I do that nothing was,” he finished.
“No,” Doc argued, coming closer, but no longer sarcastic. “No, Vance, nothing was found. But the finding of that skeleton, it brought out all that about the pirates, it did. Yes, sir, it did that! And what’s to say all the talk about the pirates didn’t show somebody—who—already—had a—map-or chart—that it meant something!”
“Let’s see it!”
Chick, forgetting the mission he was detailed to pursue, forgetting his former suspicions of Doc or of Vance, and intent only on that new topic—a mysterious, concealed map or chart, hidden among the intricate lines of a design supposed to be for an airplane, startled the two men by his exclamation.
Vance, wheeling, studied him a moment, evidently becoming satisfied that Chick’s interest was as purely on account of the new idea as was his own or that of Doc.
“Why, sure! You’ve seen it, already, anyhow,” the control chief conceded. “Tell the truth, you two, I can’t make any more of it than you did. The day that the skeleton was found, after you had all gone away, one of the engineers took me to one side, and said he had seen a queer thing when he was in the old boathouse trying to hire a dory, to get to the place where the skeleton had been discovered, and where all the excitement was centered. He had seen a half open drawer in the table there at the boathouse, and in it was a tracing paper, pretty old, and seeming to be of an airplane. It was so curious to see it there that he mentioned it and I took him in our power launch—the crash boat—to the scene of the excitement, and then cruised back to the boathouse for a look at that tracing. It was just what you’ve seen. Well, I sat there, all alone, studying it, but I couldn’t make anything out of it.”
He turned and began sorting keys on a bunch he drew from his trousers as he prepared to open the drawer of the radio table.
“At first I thought what Chick did when he first saw it. There was part of an aircraft series, stolen or mislaid and carried there by some visitor.”
“Then what did you think, afterward!” Chick asked eagerly.
“I wondered, but I didn’t actually decide much of anything,” Vance answered. “Well, you know how a fellow does when he’s absentminded, studying, or something—draws marks on paper!”