That cruise, however, began to be tedious. Already they had been for a good half hour aloft, cruising to and fro, mostly over the dismal, dark reaches of the salt marsh.
Don chose to stick quite closely over the area which had been the scene of one real mishap and several other narrowly averted crashes.
The spectre had always appeared over the swamp.
“I wish they’d start draining it,” Don mused, thinking of the gloomy marsh below his trucks. “Those engineers spend so much time surveying! If they’d get their men out there, and start work, there’d soon be no dark place close to the airport, and the ghost would go away. Or—if anybody should be trying to ruin Uncle Bruce’s new real estate development and the airport business, they’d see it was no use and quit!”
Having nothing to occupy his mind, as he kept the Dart almost automatically at flying speed and in level flight or climbing for a subsequent glide, the youth, depending on Garry and Chick for their first inkling of anything unusual, reviewed the strange mysteries which had upset the morale not only of the airport personnel and of the pilots, but of the residents of Port Washington and the vicinity, as well.
Four weeks before, to the day, just before the dedication of the new airport which had been opened in conjunction with the already established seaplane base and aircraft plant, an airplane had cracked up in the swamp. It had approached, down wind, over the morass that lay where the draining project would later bring airport expansion and a cottage community. Since the full night-landing light equipment had not been completed, at the newly dedicated field, no provision had been made at that time for night landings and so no one had been on watch for the free-lance airplane which had gone down.
Its pilot had not been badly hurt and had managed to attract rescuers by use of flares.
His story, told that night, and later persisted in at the Inquiry Board investigation of the smash, had been a weird one.
It had fired the superstitious air folks to hear him affirm that he had been making his approach to try out the new field, quietly, when a sudden glow of light in a cloud almost dead ahead of his nose, only a scant few feet higher, had startled him.
Almost at the same instant, as he maintained in his assertion, from within the glowing cloud he had seen the swift approach of a shape.