“Well,” concluded Mr. Everdail, “here are the emeralds, minus the chain, which can easily be duplicated. And you know who’s who, and why the hangar seemed to be haunted, and all about the gum. Is there anything you don’t understand?—before Larry starts taking flying instructions from Jeff and you others join my wife and I for a cruise to Maine where I will leave Mrs. Everdail.”
“Yes, sir,” Larry responded. “We saw that parachute the man in the seaplane had come down with—the harness was unbuckled, so he wasn’t hurt in the drop. What I want to bring up is this: why did he desert the stunned pilot—and not appear when we landed there?”
“I wonder,” the millionaire was thoughtful. “I wonder what you would do if you had to make a ’chute jump and then, after the excitement discovered that the pilot was ‘out’ and had a blow on the temple—and with concealed jewels in his cockpit——”
“Guess I’d hide too!”
“But why were the chunks of gum put in the pilot’s cockpit and not in the passenger’s?” Larry persisted.
“You’re getting worse than I am,” grinned Sandy.
“The passenger was not an aviator,” the rich man retorted soberly. “He put them where he thought he would sit—in the wrong place, it happened. So, when they got the jewels, it was simpler to put them where the pilot could hide them, where the gum was.”
“Another reason would be,” Jeff said, “pilots use gum and it would look more natural for it to be stuck around where he did his control job than up forward, where the special agent had it in the amphibian.”
“That’s all that bothered me,” admitted Larry.
“And Pop! goes our mystery,” chuckled Dick.