“Logical so far,” agreed Bob.
“All right. If the man refused to wait, we could telephone in to Griff to find out, and if Jenks refused to wait, we’d walk in on that Jenks fellow and say we knew he was mixed up in something wrong about the airplane crash, and throw out hints, and so on. I think, myself, he is in it somehow. He’d bluster, maybe, but if he has anything to conceal, we could scare him, and then tell him to let Griff alone for the present or tell his story to a policeman—and we might hint that he could explain a lot about the crash——”
“I like it as well as anything you’ve suggested,” said Griff. “If you could ‘get way with it.’”
“Trust us to scare him good and proper!” declared Al. “I’d ask him ‘how about the brown ‘plane’——”
“No good,” argued Bob. “We looked that craft up in the official registry and she’s from out West, and while we know her markings we haven’t found her and I don’t believe he——”
“I do,” Al defended his deduction. “I think he had it brought here for him to use, and then taken away again, and that accounts for his note—‘Everything O.K.’ when the pilot left it there and he put the note on the seat to show he had been there!”
“Then maybe this Jenks hopped off, in the morning, met the ‘plane Mr. Tredway was flying, forced it into trouble, rode it down——”
“But we saw the big cabin ship!” objected Bob to Curt’s theory. “There was no other ship around.”
“You can’t be sure!” argued Al. “That brown crate might have been up above, against the dark clouds in the sky! You couldn’t tell if we heard one or two engines. He could have surprised Mr. Tredway, could have driven him into a dive—something may have gone wrong——”
“But Barney examined the craft when it was hauled in,” urged Bob. “Nothing was wrong with it at all!”