“Sorry, buddies,” he said, shaking hands at the pier to which the yacht tied up briefly. “Don’t let it stand between your coming out to that-there new airport once in awhile to see me. I guess if Atley is through with you he’ll be done with my crate too, so maybe we’ll meet up one of these days soon. If we do, and I have the money for gas and oil, Larry, you get some more flying instruction. You may not be a crackerjack detective, but when it comes to handling that-there crate, you rate mighty good.”
He said a pleasant word to each of the other two, added a friendly clap on the arm and, with Mr. Everdail saying a brief, if not very angry farewell, the Sky Patrol quit its service, finished its air work and took to its feet.
Explanations at home accounted for the termination of their stay, which had been arranged by telephone at the beginning; and it seemed to them that the Everdail Emerald mystery was, as Dick dolefully said, “a closed book without any last pages.”
So despondent was Larry at his failure as a sleuth that he did not like to discuss their adventures with his chums.
His depression was more because his air training was over than from a real sense of failure. To Larry, one only failed when one failed to do his best—and that he had not failed in.
As a week went by Dick saw something to laugh about in their wild theories, their almost fantastic deductions. He found an old stenographers’ note book and jotted down, in ludicrous terms, the many clues and suspicious incidents they had encountered.
But Sandy was really glum.
To Sandy, the fault for their dismal failure lay at his own door.
“If I hadn’t gone off ‘half-cocked’,” he told his comrades, “maybe we would have seen something or somebody really worth following up.”
He made a vigorous mental resolve never to be caught in such a trap again.