“Toby Tew!” Chick exclaimed, recognizing the phrase. “You!——”
“In the name of all-possessed!” croaked the figure, “who else?”
“You’ve got your ‘nerve’ to brazen it out this way!” Garry said; but there was a strange look on his face; the voice, for all its disguising hoarseness, seemed oddly familiar—and not that of Toby. “Are you just doing it to try and save this mail flyer?”
“Gosh-a-mighty!” the figure retorted, “no! Time’s passed for trying to camouflage, that’s all. You think you read that traced chart? You didn’t! That cross telling where treasure was hid, now! I put it on the tracing to keep you away from the real spot, same as I bought an old, discarded skeleton from a hospital and had it discovered to start people looking in that locality—far away from where I dug and scooped in mud.”
“Well,” Chick cried, “you are caught! The swamp is watched. When you left the Chief, he had you watched.”
“Gosh-a-mighty! No such thing! He left us all go. All I had to do was to go home, start to go to bed, get these togs, walk down to the seaplane landing stage, tell the detective on guard I was a special officer assigned by the Chief to patrol the swamp shore—then in I got in that crash boat—and here I am, with good tail-winds and everything my own way!”
“You’re not Toby Tew!” Garry exclaimed.
“Toby doesn’t talk about ‘seaplane landing stages’ and ‘tail winds.’ Those are aviation and he’s a boatman as well as a theatre man—and he can’t fly!”
“Then it’s Doc!” cried Chick.
“No!” Don had caught the expressions and rightly judged them. “Doc couldn’t draw an airplane tracing: certainly the only other man besides this mail flyer, who knows about slotted wings and can make them is——”