Don kicked the door shut. Garry saw that his comrade placed his back against it, and let go his hold. Chick sprang back, tense and ready for any surprise move.
“Just as I thought,” Don said triumphantly. “The air mail flyer!”
“And what of it?” The man got to his feet, as Garry picked up the electric flash and laid it on the table, still glowing.
He directed its beams on a quantity of objects they had set there, ready for such a climax.
“We’ll tell you,” Don began. “First, Mister Pilot, you learned from the Indian, John, that there was some treasure hidden somewhere in this swamp. You went to the Indian village, concealing most of yourself in your pilot’s togs. Then you located the map Ti-O-Ga had, and took a picture of it with a vest pocket camera, came back and used our dark room enlarging outfit to make the tiny picture big enough to trace out and then you camouflaged that map tracing with wings and other airplane parts.”
Garry turned his light on various objects as he took up the accusation.
“This is the vest pocket camera.” He brought it into sharp relief. “Chick found it in your cottage room.”
“You’re crazy! I never owned one.”
“No use blustering!” Chick cried. “The whole thing is plain to us! You wanted a bigger map so you could lay out cross-sectional lines on it and number them. I made a blue-print of the tracing while we had it and by good luck I had picked up two pieces of paper to print on, and then put one aside, the lower one; but it was clear enough, after we made a contact negative from it on film, and then redeveloped and intensified that! We saw the cross lines, and the figures on the paper checked with figures on the bottom of the tracing, most of them being checked with pencil checks to show they had been covered.”
“And what did I do that for?”