Practical, a little sarcastic, Mr. McLeod took charge.
“I don’t suppose it occurred to any of you that the fellow you tell about had to get here somehow, and to get away,” he said. “Daylight makes it clear—see those stakes with the rope?—that the helicopter has been kept here a long time. It didn’t occur to you that the fellow in disguise might have come here in a dory—and left by the same means!”
“No, it didn’t!” admitted Don.
“Well, boys, that’s what happened.” The airport executive pointed to the grass, stamped and bent down, and when they asserted that their own searching had accomplished the tell-tale destruction he smiled, led them past the clusters near the boats, further inshore, showing that grass had been pushed aside, tangled by the passage of a body, and then indicated a smaller, shallower, but practical waterway, diverging toward the South.
“Here are marks of a dory’s nose on the mud,” he explained. “You have been watching for a man who calmly sculled or drifted away.”
“But we couldn’t see that at night,” objected Chick, “any more than we could see the paths out of the swamps. Now, I can, though—and I’m for getting to a telephone, calling the chief of police, and letting him send a man here to see about putting this Indian in a cell.”
The Indian, not much over nineteen, became more talkative when this purpose was mentioned.
“I haven’t done anything really wrong!” he declared. His English, like his clothing, was good, showing education and refinement of a sort.
“A year ago,” he said, revealing his identity as the son of Ti-O-Ga, and named simply John Tioga, “a year ago a film company came up to our place to make some films dealing with Indian witchcraft and dances, for the prologue of a picture. Father played the old ‘medicine man’ and I was a sort of magician-devil in the picture.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with this,” began Chick.