“I see Larry! Yoo-hoo!” Sandy shouted.
Larry, in his rubber boat, just having given up trying to explain how a number of bits of chewing gum had transferred themselves from the amphibian, where last he saw them—or some like them—to the seaplane, gestured and pantomimed to try to tell them his news.
Flying past they could not fully understand.
The new pilot waved a reassuring glove at Larry and swerved back toward the end of the island. Larry wondered who he was and what his comrades were doing with him; but Larry, always practical, let the questions wait for their eventual answers and continued to study the half-sunken seaplane.
No new clues offered themselves. He detached one of the hard, adhering chunks of gum and dropped it into his pocket, “just in case,” he said, half-grinning, “just in case they transfer themselves somewhere else. I’ll leave twenty-nine of them—and see.”
The supposed Mr. Everdail scribbled a note which he handed back to Sandy, who caught his idea of dropping instructions on the deck of the yacht.
Borrowing Dick’s jackknife for a weight, Sandy prepared the message.
Cruising slowly the yacht came into sight.
Their pilot was skillful at coursing in such a direction and at such a height that he could skim low over the water craft’s radio mast and come almost to stalling speed while Sandy cast the note overside.
Dick, who had caught up Larry’s abandoned binoculars, saw as they zoomed and climbed that a sailor had rescued the note before it bounded over the cabin roof and deck into the sea.