“Oh, no,” Sandy protested. “It just flashed over me—putting all the facts together, the way I made up my mind I’d do.”
He outlined the rest of his inference.
“That was proved—the seaplane coming out to the yacht proved that the passenger who said he was a London agent, and wasn’t at all, had changed his plans. Well, say that he had arranged with Mimi, Mrs. Everdail’s maid, to have her throw over the jewels——”
“But she wouldn’t make the mistake of giving a confederate the wrong ones. She’d seen the real ones.”
They were working on the check-up and warming of the engine as they talked. Dick made the objection to Sandy’s theory.
“She’d know that the man knew the difference too!” Larry added.
That could be true, Sandy admitted. But he argued that the girl must have seen the captain take the stern life preserver to his cabin, and might have guessed, even observed through a cabin port, what he did. In that case she would have thrown over the life preserver knowing that her confederate would put it in the seaplane. And he had done exactly that!
“But the passenger jumped with a different life preserver!” Dick was more anxious to prove every step of Sandy’s argument than to find flaws in it.
“I think we found the life preserver that they might have had on board the seaplane all the time. And the other one—we never thought of the yacht’s name being painted on its own things. So we took it for granted that we had the real hiding place.”
“You argue real good, young feller.”