“Think so!” Don admitted. “Tell you better after I’ve made sure!”
“Where you think you find?” The old Indian stood firm.
Don was secretly delighted: this gave him an opportunity.
“You see,” he explained, “after a photograph was made of your map, it was enlarged, and a tracing was made, of the larger size. That tracing was disguised with airplane parts, but it still looked like the hull of some kind of boat, a brig, or a brigantine. The ‘ghost’ was plotting the swamp out in narrow strips. The design enabled him to put lines across, looking like inch and foot divisions—but they were all sections of the swamp. You see, he flew to and fro, over the swamp, taking moving pictures. Then he kept a projector head here, in a locker, and when nobody was on this floor, at night, he’d develop his films, dry them in our dark room, and then project them by putting the projector head in front of our enlarging camera lamp. He was searching for any place that looked as though a ship had gone down. But—he was all wrong.”
“How was he ‘all wrong?’” demanded the control chief eagerly.
“He was looking for a sunken brigantine—or some sort of boat!”
“How was that so ‘wrong?’” the mail pilot, lurking in the background, wanted to know.
“We saw through the camouflaged design,” Don said. “We had a developed picture, what camera men in the movie colonies call a ‘shot’ of the swamp, from very high up—a wide-angle shot! It showed all the creeks and channels. We compared that with the blue-print we had—that the ‘ghost’ didn’t take away!” he spoke meaningly, “and we saw that the little mark probably indicating the treasure place, in the real map, that looked as if it was just a frame joint in the airplane sketch, and showed the treasure in the hold of the ‘brigantine’ at the stern, was really a mark at a point in one of the swamp channels!”
“You don’t say!” Scott bent forward.
“You see, the part of the map that looks like the deck of the brig—is—Crab Channel!”