“Wait!” begged Sandy. “Everybody will get mixed up and hunt in the same places. We ought to organize——”
“Sound common sense,” commented Miss Serena. “But if you ask——”
Sandy guessed that she would have given her opinion, if asked, that the search was useless.
She was given no time for the comment. Leaving her with the white-faced stewardess and the pilot, whose injuries prevented him from being of much use due to his evident weakness, the others, under Mr. Everdail, were grouped into parties. Given a definite territory, each set out, one group to search the grove under Jeff’s leadership, another to cover the shore section, boathouse and boats, with Captain Parks and his men in the party. Others, under the mate and engineer, divided the rest of the searchers to beat the further and less cultivated woods on the estate and to walk the roads, while Miss Serena gladly agreed to telephone to outlying estates, and to the nearby town to have a watch kept for any unknown person, woman or man.
“Where’s Larry—and Dick?” asked Jeff, as Sandy ran beside him.
“Searching the hangar——”
“But it was locked and all doors down,” Jeff grunted. “Why waste time there?”
“I guess we thought, just at first, somebody might have hidden the preserver somewhere—we thought we saw somebody in the hangar the day the mystery started, but we found no one, so Dick thought——”
“Well, go tell them to come and help me in the grove. Don’t waste time there!”
Sandy separated from the superstitious one, as the latter rushed among the trees, muttering that some omen had warned him of trouble.