Don looked up. There was the Dart, coming over, shooting the water landing, making its approach, coming in, setting down!
He recognized, at its controls, as he flung aside his helmet, the pilot who had been injured in the first crack-up, the night they saw the apparition: he had been driven down from the farm by its owner and was sufficiently healed in his arm to handle stick and throttle.
With him was the Police Chief.
“Get him?” hailed the officer, as the gas was cut and switch put off, and as Don shook his head, shouting his explanation, the Dart ran up close to the wharf.
“The swamp is surrounded,” the Chief cried. “We let them all go, as you had planned. Didn’t the culprit walk into the trap?” Don told him breathlessly what had happened, urged that the Dart go aloft and scout.
The Chief urged Don to occupy his place, while he attended to the man over whom Chick was working incompetently.
Don hesitated: they might need to use the Dragonfly, also, he protested. The newly recovered pilot suggested that Don fly the Dart, reconnoitering, as it was the less stable ship and in his condition he preferred the steadier, more easily controlled craft. They began the exchange, listening for a motor. No sound came.
Garry, recovering his strength, if still teary-eyed, blundering along to find his abandoned first aid kit, saw the Dart go in, and felt that for all his bravado, Mister Spook was almost as good as captured.
He broke through the tall grasses, near where the path ended.
His eyes saw an amazing sight! There, where the mail ’plane had gone into the mud, fresh planking had been laid across the mud, and on it rested the airplane, the boards concealed by wings and a camouflage of cut grass: its broken hull had been re-covered, freshly doped. It had no pontoons; but on each side of the fuselage slanted auxiliary wings of thin boards had been attached by wire. If it could be started and raced off the board support, he saw, the slanted planks would serve to lift it higher with each gain of speed, as a boat of the speed type is lifted by its side-flanges. And—in his disguising garments, Scott was working feverishly at the motor. Garry leaped forward. Scott tore off his mask to show a face of fury and dismay.