They hastened to their respective homes, securing the bicycles. In most instances somebody gave them a “lift” down to the waterside base, but each rode well, and was enduring and speedy on the pedals.
“The more I think about it,” Garry stated, pedaling swiftly and then coasting down the inclined road toward the water, “the more I think it over, the less I believe it’s from the control tower, and the surer I am that Toby Tew is the man who makes spook pictures on clouds.”
“He used the helicopter!” Chick contributed.
Don argued his conviction sturdily. How, he proposed, could a man in a helicopter throw a picture on a cloud without being seen?
“Our Dragonfly and the mail ’plane were the only ones visible—I didn’t see the helicopter at all, the night of the ‘spooking,’” he asserted.
“No,” Garry admitted, “but, for that matter, we didn’t see Scott in the Dart. In a black sky, with lightning flickering to keep your eyes altering the dilation of the pupils, we might have missed seeing them; but the helicopter was there, maybe floating just above the cloud!”
“It couldn’t have been!” Don was triumphant. “I drove right into that cloud!”
Swinging his handlebars to the left to pass down the airport road, Garry was silent: Chick, though, took up the argument.
“We can soon find out,” he declared. “We can search the control room and see if we find the least thing to back up Don’s notion that it’s the control chief we have to blame. I think, myself, Mr. Tew would be foolish—or brazen!—to show how the thing was done, if he was the guilty man.”
The control tower room was in charge of Vance’s assistant, who was busy taking down air condition reports from a radio with a headset. He nodded, and went on, concentrating his attention on the weather data which must be posted—and accurately—on the weather board in the pilots’ assembling room.