“Tracings! You don’t say? Let’s see them!”
“In the morning!” said Chick, eagerly. “You ought to go and help Don and Garry. Where’s the Dart?”
“Over in the shelter of the grass, across the water, there. What are the other two doing?”
Quickly Chick told him where Don and Garry had started for in the dory. They scanned the water. The dory, invisible, hidden and held by the wind among the weeds, told them no story of its abandonment.
“I guess they’re at the crack-up,” surmised Scott. “Light two red flare signals, Chick. Get those two back here. If I don’t get back to the Dart she’ll never get above the storm in time. The same for the Dragonfly. Get those boys back here! If Don hurries he can get up aloft in time.” Moving away he added, “After the storm we’ll search.”
Chick climbed to the struts over a rocking, tossing wing of the tethered Dragonfly, secured signals from the fuselage, and as he saw them set and ignited Scott hurried off to get his own lighter ship out of the danger area. Chick refused to go along, preferring to risk Don’s less experienced piloting. He would not desert his chums.
“By gracious!” he exclaimed to himself, “I wonder if there are any more of those plans in the drawer of that table? Doc might have tried to hide them, stopped to celebrate, got too ‘tight’ to know what he was doing, and struck his head when he staggered and fell. That would account for the drawer being open so the paper could blow out—I’ll go and have another look!”
He hastened back into the hovel, investigating by the flicker of the lantern, wind-blown, but staunchly holding its own.
“Funny!” commented the youthful searcher. “Why did he have only the least important plan—the sketch? Maybe he has the others on his person! I ought not to have let him go. But I was so——”
He paused, his words choked back into his throat by a strange sound. Had something struck the hovel? A blown limb, crashing against the side, could have made that heavy, but dull thud, hard to locate.