“Yes! I’ve seen you do that when you were in a brown study,” Chick agreed. “You draw—let’s see—J. V.”
“Exactly what I do!” Vance agreed. “Well, you two, believe it or not, while I sat there, thinking, I drew my initials on the table, and one set got on the corner of the tracing. I didn’t see how it mattered, and I meant to bring the thing here anyhow. So I let them stand.”
“But you left it there,” contended Doc, “left it, you did. Yet you claimed it, you did so, as yours!”
“Yes. I dropped it in the drawer when a hail came for me to bring the crash launch to help my boss. I wasn’t control chief then, only an engineer working out angles and distances across the swamp for the airport extension,” Vance declared. “I forgot all about the tracing until I read in the papers about the piracy and the hints about lost treasure and all that folderol. Then, when Chick so kindly brought in the tracing, I recollected my initials—and there you are.”
Chick reserved his opinion about the truth and reasonableness of the explanation. Certainly it was a point in Vance’s favor that he was already willingly slipping a key into the table drawer.
“Why!—look here!” Vance cried, “this drawer isn’t—locked!”
He dragged it open. At once Chick knew, just as he saw that Doc realized, that the tracing was gone.
Had Vance made up all that story? Had someone picked the lock? Was that queerly disguised tracery of lines more than an airplane design? Who had it?
Chick took no time to puzzle out answers.
“Never mind, for now!” he exclaimed. “I wasn’t such a dummy, after all. While I had that tracing, before it got lost again I decided to make a blue-print of it. I did, too!”