CHAPTER I A PILOT WHO LIKED SPOOKS

“Scared?”

“Not a bit!”

Garry Duncan, just behind the pilot who had asked the question, answered it in his usual, cool manner.

Behind him in the three-place open cockpit biplane, his thirteen-year-old chum displayed none of his calm.

“I’m scared!” Chick cried as the pilot cut down his throttle. Chick raised his voice to a tremulous shout, “Scott—turn back.”

The man at the controls laughed.

“Don’t be a baby!” he counseled. “Just because you see a cloud begin to look shimmery—the first sign of the ghost, according to all the pilots who have seen it—don’t lose your nerve.”

“But—this ghost hunt might be dangerous,” Chick began to plead. “C-can’t you—Scott, can’t you t-turn and go out on the bay?”

“No. I cut the gun too much and the engine died. We have to glide in, dead-stick, to the best landing we can.” There was no regret in the pilot’s voice. He proposed to carry through his purposes.

“But—” Chick was hopeful as he offered an argument, “in the dark here, the swamp is dangerous—you might miss water and you’d get the wings torn in the grass.” He added quickly, “or you may get our pontoons bogged—” As the airport searchlight made a cloud glow he cried, “Yes—bogged down in the ooze.” He expected to see the ship bank, indicating that his hint was being acted on.

Instead the ship’s nose went down. Scott, with a little laugh of amusement at Chickering Brown’s fears, found additional terrors for the youngest of the pair with them.

“Yes,” he agreed, “and then the spectre that always appears in the clouds might fly down on us and say ‘boo!’”

He turned, as they glided, high above the swamp.

“How about it, Garry? Wouldn’t that be awful?” Garfield Duncan, fifteen-year-old student-pilot and assistant to an airport manager’s nephew, answered seriously.

“Terrible!” he agreed, “but it would be Chick’s own fault. He was so interested in the mystery that he vowed he wouldn’t be scared.”

“Well!” Chick hoped for one means of allaying his fears—light. “Why don’t you throw over a landing flare, Scott! It’s pitchy-black down in the marsh.”

“Scott will get us down, even without power.” Garry voiced his confidence in the test pilot who knew the channels and open water spaces like a book. “Great Scott,” as they had nicknamed him, made many test flights for the American branch of a foreign seaplane manufacturer; of late, since an airport had been inaugurated in connection with the seaplane “base,” Scott had flown over the marsh at night, conducting tests of new lighting equipment, spotlight, searchlight and beacon.

“If you’re afraid,” he added, “try whistling, Chick, my boy! I’ve heard that ghosts won’t come around if you whistle.”

Usually Garry did not tease his younger chum; but Chick had been so confident of his own bravery, had so insistently begged to be one of the “spook trappers,” that Chick’s terror in the face of darkness—and of nothing worse, so far—prompted him to be a little sarcastic.

“It’s all very well to sneer,” said Chick. “I wasn’t scared, back in the design room—but here—” he stopped. They had been filing blue-prints in the plant of an Italian aircraft building company when Scott, its test pilot, had come quietly into the blue-print room where Garry made the multitudes of blue-prints from pen drawings for the many detailed parts of the company’s product.

The secrecy of his entrance had fascinated Garry’s more youthful companion, who filed the blue-prints and sketches. Chick had caught a hint of something secretive about Scott; it had fired his ready imagination and he had been so eager to hover close that Scott, after a moment of hesitation, had included him in the proposal he had made.

“You both realize how serious that Sky Spook scare has come to be,” he had whispered. “I wasn’t going to say anything to Chick, because he’s pretty young—” at once Chick had denied the insinuation, “—all right, Chick,” Scott had continued. “Just the same, I wasn’t going to include you—but it may help, at that—if you are ‘game’ and not scarey.”

Assured of Chick’s absolute bravery and perfect gameness the test pilot had suggested that he wanted to “get to the bottom—or top—of the spook business.”

“Ever since the first pilot cracked up,” he had said, “and explained that he thought he saw a spooky-looking crate flying straight at him out of a cloud, I’ve thought he was trying to ‘cover up’ his own carelessness with that story. The next one to see ‘it’ must have caught the scare and had an overdose of imaginittis. But it has gotten into the newspapers and they call the new airport ‘Mystery Airport.’ It’s ruining business for Don McLeod’s uncle, and I’d like to help him out by proving that there isn’t any ghost ship flying in and out of the clouds to make a pass at every pilot whose firm gives the new airport its business.”

Garry had agreed with Scott’s theory that some hidden enemy was trying to ruin the airport’s business, and hamper its growth. Readily he had consented to help Scott with his simple plan, which required that with Scott the two youths would fly, that night, inviting the appearance of the ghostly, or human apparition, at which time Scott felt confident that he could run down the culprit and end the scare before it further harmed the morale of the flying force or resulted in the loss of contracts for air line hangar space and landing and take-off fees.

The eagerness with which Chick had seconded the plan, his pleading to be included in the airplane’s passengers as an observer and signalman, his stout declarations of his complete fearlessness, had suddenly become empty boasts when the three-place ship had reached the vicinity of the swamps adjacent to the airport but not yet drained and prepared for filling in. Eventually the greater part of the swamps would be changed into good ground. Engineers were already preparing to drain away the salt tides flowing in from Long Island Sound and Little Neck Bay. Unless the unexplained mystery of the spectral sky denizen could be settled, it seemed unlikely that the swamp land need ever be reclaimed for airport expansion.

Scott, for years the hangar supervisor and chief test pilot for the airplane construction plant and seaplane base which had existed before the airport project in combination with them had been started, was very anxious, it seemed, to end the ghost scare.

With his two youthful aides, confident Garry and shivering Chick, he made a good descent to the surface of a wide sheet of enclosed, shallow water, let the amphibian craft, which could make either earth or water landings, run out of momentum, and then sat back, loosening his helmet chin straps.

“Here’s the full plan,” he turned around in the cockpit in the dark, salty-smelling marsh, silent except for the plash of a leaping fish or the cry of a gull seeking a belated dinner, “I didn’t want to be seen talking too long at the plant. You never know who ‘might be’—you know!”

“I understand,” admitted Garry. “Let’s hear it all.”

“I went to Don as soon as I left you—and he’s managed to get Mr. McLeod to let him go aloft in the Dart.” He referred to a light, fast two-seater, the personal property of the airport manager, which his seventeen-year-old nephew had secured for the evening. “Now, Don is as good an amateur pilot as you’ll find; but he lacks stunting experience. He will come here, set down, and then I’ll take the Dart and keep it warmed up and ready, while Don, with you two for observers, will go up and cruise around—and invite Mr. Ghost to come at you!”

Chick shivered and muttered under his breath. “If Mr. Spectre shows up, you signal to me——”

“I know.” Garry recalled arrangements used in other night communications, during night tests. “If the spook appears in the clouds, we set off a red flare. If ‘it’ takes off from the ground, we give you a green Verey signal and you’ll be able to catch anything slower than greased lightning in that Dart—and drive down the ghost and prove it’s only some human person, after all.”

“Well, that’s what I hope to do.”

“Sup—supposing it isn’t a h-human being?”

“That would tickle me to pieces, Chick, old top,” laughed the pilot. “I’d sort of like to have it turn out that way. Why? Because I never shook hands with a ghost, and it ought to be a right nice experience.”

“He—it would scare you out of your togs!” scoffed Chick.

“Oh, no!” Scott assured him. “Spectres, if they really do exist, can’t hurt you. It’s only your fear that can do you any harm. Now, I like spooks!—-”

“Yes?” Garry pointed up toward the July night sky. “Well, there’s one! Go up and get acquainted. We’ll wait here!”

He had meant to joke, to terrify Chick; but he became silent and a trifle awed.

There was—something!—black against a luminous Summer cloud!

CHAPTER II THE AIRPLANE GUARD

Shuddering, terrified, Chick clung to Garry’s steady arm as he gazed upward.

One of the clustered clouds seemed to be picked out from the others by a phosphorescent glow: it was luminous but not fiery; whitish in tint rather than ruddy.

Out of it came a silent, gliding, dark shape—an airplane!

For a brief interval Garry felt his own blood chilling. That spectral shape was very much like the mental pictures he had visualized after he had listened to the story of the pilot who had cracked up because of a similar apparition.

Then the real explanation flashed into his mind.

He gave a relieved laugh.

“Hooray!” he cried in the still, dark cockpit seat, “the ghost of the skies is explained.”

“So it is!” agreed Scott, the pilot.

“Don’t—” began Chick; but his own words died as he saw that they were not facing any supernatural appearance.

The light died out of the cloud as the airplane, a lightly-built and fast-moving craft, came steadily lower, closer. It was real!

“It’s Don!” said Garry, reassuringly.

“Yes, it is Don, all right,” agreed Chick, his own fears gone.

Garry watched the light ship make its approach, silent but genuine and then gave Chick a brief lecture.

“I’m glad you came, after all—aren’t you?” he remarked. “Now you can see for yourself that every scare that seems to be started by spooks is all in the way you judge what you see.”

“It’s that way just this time,” admitted Chick grudgingly. “The darkness, and the swamp, and all the talk made me think I saw a ghost ship coming out of a lighted cloud.”

“Certainly,” agreed Garry, “and you thought that, because you heard somebody else say that was how the ghost appeared. But it turns out to be Don in the Dart, coming down out of the sky just when the control man at the airport had his searchlight switched on and turned it past the clouds.”

“For my part,” Scott informed the two chums, “I don’t think the first crack-up happened because the pilot saw a real ’bus.”

“I do,” argued Garry.

The talk ceased as the light ship came swiftly down, across the marsh, dropping lower, leveling off, setting its pontoon body lightly into the water.

If not as experienced, in point of years, as Scott, the seventeen-year-old junior flyer at the Dart’s controls was as expert. Landings in daylight, night conditions, or in darkness, were easy for Don: because of a season of timidity concerning “getting down,” at the start of his flying practice, the youth had determined to break himself of his timidity before it interfered with his rapid progress. Alone in his uncle’s Dart, he had made practice take-offs and landings in every sort of weather and under all imaginable conditions, until he was so sure of his ship that he had no uneasiness about setting down. He realized that the modern airplane is so well stabilized, so well designed, that it does just what its pilot wants it to do—that in every case where some part has not failed, the pilot’s mental condition and its resulting reaction on the handling of the ship is what makes the difference between safe flying and accidents that result in injury or worse.

The small, wide-winged craft sent out a split crest of foam, coming swiftly closer to the Dragonfly; but it lost speed and Don maneuvered it to a point close alongside the larger craft and with his own wings just a little behind those of the biplane. Gliding up to its stop, the Dart rested quietly in the still, rather murky water.

“Hello!” its pilot greeted the others. “Did I give you a solution of the Mystery of Mystery Airport!”

“You certainly did!” Garry admitted. “Chick thought you were the flying phantom——”

“Just as the first pilot to crash thought some chance ship, lighted up by a flash of some beacon, was the ghost,” Don interrupted.

“I’m not so sure of that,” Scott spoke, taking up the thread of a statement he had been about to make before the Dart came down. “I’ve been interested in the mystery—I like spooks, you know——”

“More than I do!” broke in Chick, gloomily. Scott, laughing, agreed.

“Every fellow to his taste,” he quoted. “Anyhow, I’ve been reading up on ghosts, and talking to some of the ‘old inhabitants’ around the marsh. Want to know what I dug up?”

All three eagerly chorused agreement. “Away back in the days when airplanes were tricky to handle and the pilots knew less about aerodynamics than they do today,” he stated, “a flyer was over this swamp, on just about this sort of night,” he indicated the clustered, slow-moving, fleecy groups of clouds, some assuming the pyramid shape of thunderheads, “one of the clam-diggers at the edge of the swamp recalls it very plainly. He was out at low tide after clams when—it happened!”

“What!” asked Chick, forgetting his uneasiness and the gloomy, spooky environment in his suspense.

The aviator had appeared suddenly, coming down, through a cloud, as Scott repeated the tale told him by an old man who earned his meagre living with a clam-hoe and bucket; at the same instant another ship, diving swiftly in apparent oblivion of the first, came into view.

“It must have happened in the flick of an eyelid,” Scott went on. “As old Ike tells it, he heard the engines, looked up, saw one ship for a split second, saw the other, and then—saw them come together!”

“Oh!” exclaimed Garry, “collided, did they!” Scott completed his story quickly, after admitting that Garry had diagnosed the accidental smash correctly.

“Right-o! And they never found one of the ships. It must have gone down in Devil’s Sink.” He referred to a portion of the marsh either of the quicksand bottom sort or very similar in the softness of its muddy shallows. “And—-”

“That’s—why they found—a skeleton, there!” Chick shivered as he spoke in a hushed voice.

“Maybe.”

“But—” Don objected, “what connection is there between an accident years ago and the excitement that has gotten into some of the newspapers and made a reporter call our new development ‘Mystery Airport?’”

“Ever read the ‘Proceedings’ and other books of the Society for Psychical Research?” Scott questioned in turn.

“I saw some of them in a bookstore,” Garry admitted. “They were too dull and prosy for me. Just old stories collected by scientific men who were trying to find out whether ghosts existed or not.”

“What did they decide?” Chick spoke eagerly.

“Nothing very definite,” Scott informed him. “But I’ve gone over a lot of the dry ‘case-histories’ and I firmly believe that if somebody has done something wrong, he has to haunt and stay around the place.”

“Like a criminal ‘haunting’ the scene of his crime,” chuckled Don. “I’m surprised at you, Scott. I believe, in every case, if you could get to the bottom of it you’d find that the ghost is either produced by fraud, or else some perfectly natural things are misjudged——”

“Chick thought you were the sky spook,” broke in Garry.

“I believe that’s so in most of the cases,” Scott agreed. “But this time I think the ghost is restless, because he was careless in coming along through the clouds where he couldn’t see ahead far enough to be able to avoid other ships—and he may have caused the other ship to go down into the Sink. That makes his spirit hang around, and of course whenever it appears, it lives over all the terrible scenes of the smash!”

“But I just proved—” began Don.

“Yes, you proved that people can be mistaken,” Scott was serious. “You didn’t prove that any ship was near at the other times that pilots have claimed they saw the ghost.”

“One caught the fever from another,” argued Garry. “The first one saw something—or he tried to get out of culpability for carelessness in making his crack-up, by saying a spook put him out of control. The rest were all superstitious and the story got headway. The next pilot to see a flicker of Summer lightning and a bird flying or anything at all, was quick to twist it into a spectre, and come down to tell his story and give everybody chills and shivers.”

“I think we’ll soon find out,” Scott spoke quietly.

Surprised, the others clamored for his reason.

“This is just the sort of night that the three other pilots had, when they claimed to see the ghost of an airplane coming out of luminous clouds,” Scott stated. “It’s close, humid—storm-breeding July weather.

“Well, then, for another thing, if you check up you’ll find that the spook has appeared every seven days—and this is the seventh night since this last time!”

“Let’s go home, Don,” whispered Chick, across the narrow span of water. Don laughed.

“No, sirree!” he retorted. “In the first place, if it is pure chance, nothing will happen, because it isn’t reasonable that a beam of light from the control room search-lamp would strike a cloud every seventh night and four successive weeks. Besides, it isn’t possible that an airplane would be flying around just at the same time that light came, and that no other ship would be noticed.”

“No,” declared Garry. “My opinion is that it’s some real person who flies out of the clouds, after seeing a ship coming. Then he goes up into another cloud and is lost, and because of the first fib the pilot told to protect himself from censure by the Board of Inquiry sitting about the crack-up, all the rest believe they see a spook.”

“I think he is trying to use the ghost scare to drive business away from Uncle,” Don asserted. “Uncle has several people he can name who are none too fond of him. Any one of them might be doing the ‘spooking.’”

“In that case,” Garry was practical, “if we go up, scouting, that person will know it, and won’t ‘appear’ tonight.”

“That’s why I liked Scott’s plan when he suggested guarding the sky,” Don agreed. “It’s important, too—because Uncle Bruce is expecting to get a big airline to contract for space for its ships, servicing and all that, take-off and landing, and fuel and oil. It will mean a lot to him not to lose that contract. If we prevent any ‘spooking’ tonight, there won’t be any newspaper scarehead stories tomorrow to make the men hesitate about signing up.”

“Then let’s get up out of this stagnant water!” urged Chick, fired by the realistic explanation of the spectre. “We’ll be a sort of Sky Watchman.”

“An Airlane Guard!” suggested Garry.