The Ghost of Mystery Airport by Van Powell

Author:Van Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press

CHAPTER XVIII

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A CONFESSION AND THE CHARM

ALL THAT NIGHT THEY REMAINED on guard. Taking turns, first Don in the helicopter and Garry on the shore, then the control chief replacing Garry and Chick taking Don’s station, they watched.

Not a thing happened.

The Indian, sullen, refused to talk.

Threats did not seem to disturb him. Pleas failed to move him. He realized that they had no way to enforce the threats. None of them dared to leave the swamps by the paths, taking him as a prisoner, because it had been his own familiarity with swamp trails that had led them safely through, although he refused to say why or how he had become so well informed. Besides, as Don argued, they dared not leave the swamp unguarded.

However, they kept a close watch toward the airport. Don’s surmise that his uncle would return from delivering the mail, find their note and institute a search, proved to be correct. Their flares being all used up in landings, however, they had no way to signal, and evidently the airport manager, deprived of Scott’s services, had no pilot to send aloft as a scout.

Early, just after dawn, however, he arrived, in a rowboat, at the mouth of Crab Channel, where Garry had driven the electric launch on his way to summon aid.

“Hello!” shouted the older man, laying on his oars until the launch came up and took him in tow, “I’ve had the chief of police and his men busy all night, trying to get reports of any crack-up, and scouting; but they must not have come to the lower end of the swamp at all.”

He caught a rope flung by Garry who towed his rowboat up to the scene of their all-night vigil.

Practical, a little sarcastic, Mr. McLeod took charge.

“I don’t suppose it occurred to any of you that the fellow you tell about had to get here somehow, and to get away,” he said. “Daylight makes it clear—see those stakes with the rope?—that the helicopter has been kept here a long time. It didn’t occur to you that the fellow in disguise might have come here in a dory—and left by the same means!”

“No, it didn’t!” admitted Don.

“Well, boys, that’s what happened.” The airport executive pointed to the grass, stamped and bent down, and when they asserted that their own searching had accomplished the tell-tale destruction he smiled, led them past the clusters near the boats, further inshore, showing that grass had been pushed aside, tangled by the passage of a body, and then indicated a smaller, shallower, but practical waterway, diverging toward the South.

“Here are marks of a dory’s nose on the mud,” he explained. “You have been watching for a man who calmly sculled or drifted away.”

“But we couldn’t see that at night,” objected Chick, “any more than we could see the paths out of the swamps. Now, I can, though—and I’m for getting to a telephone, calling the chief of police, and letting him send a man here to see about putting this Indian in a cell.

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