Waving to his two watching comrades as they grew smaller to his peering eyes, Larry turned his attention to the work of scanning, from the forward place, all the indented shore line, north, that the mist had uncovered.
To their left, as they sped on, the lighthouse poked its tower out of the drifting, dispelling fog.
Soon Jeff dropped low, diminished the throb of the engine, cruising while Larry kept watch.
“Yonder it is!” Larry’s hand gestured ahead and to the side.
Jeff, peering, located the wing of the seaplane, the fuselage half submerged in muddy channel ooze, the tail caught on the matted eel-grass.
In the mouth of a broad channel they touched water and ran out of momentum with the wings hovering over the grassy bank to either side.
“Now what?” demanded Jeff. “We can’t go in any closer.”
Already Larry had his coat and shoes off. Stripping them off, and with no one to observe, removing all his clothes, he lowered himself onto a pontoon and thence to the water, chilly but not too cold on the hot June afternoon.
Striking out with due care not to get caught by any submerged tangle of roots or grasses, Larry swam the forty feet.
“The pilot’s in his cockpit—” he gasped. “He’s—he isn’t——”