“I wouldn’t chance swimming all the way down the swamps to the nearest village on shore,” Larry said quietly.
“This-here is a fix that is a fix,” morosely Jeff summed up the situation. “Here we are with a pocketful of emeralds—and no gas and no way to get to any—and if anybody knows the gems are in this gum—we’d be helpless if they wanted to take them.”
Larry did not answer.
He was mentally going over the seemingly unbreakable deadlock.
One thing that kept coming into his mind was the strange fact that if the disappearing passenger of the seaplane had taken the rubber boat he had not also taken the hidden jewels.
“He must have known something about them—or guessed,” he reflected. “If they were put in the gum while they were flying—unless it was done while they were in the fog. But, even then, he knew all that excitement meant something. I don’t understand it—he did know, because he must have hired the pilot and the seaplane to get the emeralds.”
Still, in that case, he mused, if the man had known where the gems were, why hadn’t he inflated the rubber boat and taken them all, in the first escape?
A possible solution came to him.
Saying nothing to Jeff he bent his whole power of thinking on the more important discovery of a way to get fuel.
Climbing onto the amphibian and dressing, he considered that matter without arriving at any workable solution.