LITMIR.BIZ

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he hadn't made me promise to keep it on the q. t. till he got away. Said he didn't want to be pestered, and he didn't expect to ride a single 'nother kid free. See? Well, he's pulling out to-day just about this time, so I can loosen up on it. See?"

      "Golly, Cat!" exclaimed Jimmy, now fully convinced and looking at the new birdman with undisguised admiration. "Say, fellow, what did it feel like?"

      To his intensely absorbed scout audience, not to mention certain grown individuals on the side lines, he recounted, in his most humorous style, his varied sensations and experiences during the flight.

      "Is Mr. Hardy just as good a pilot as that one?" asked Legs eagerly, after Cat was apparently on the point of exhausting his narrative.

      "Big sight better," he asserted.

      "How did your father get in with him?" queried Jimmy.

      ​"Listen! You know Father he's had airplanes on the brain ever since the Wright brothers pulled off their experiments on the North Carolina coast way back yonder before we were born. He's read every darn thing he could lay his hands on about flying. He's been up every time he could beg or buy an air ride, and, when the war came on, he was crazy as a Junebug to get in as a pilot, but of course he got turned down because he was too old and his eyes are bum. See? Well, while he was fooling and fussing around trying to buck into the service, he ran across Hardy and they've been buddies ever since, though my dad's about twenty years older. Now, my old man is some horse pulling wires. See? And when he heard about that N. C. Topographical Coast Survey, his pull landed the job for Hardy—I call him Tom behind his back."

      "State Top—what? Whew!" whistled Jimmy. "Jimmy, that's a jawbreaker."

      "You can listen, but don't try to handle," proclaimed Cat with mock solemnity. "Now, listen some more and I'll teach you something. You know surveyors used to trot all over the ​country with rods and a lot of junk and take about five years to survey one measly little county. Well, now an aviator and a photographer can go up and take views with the camera upside down, and in an hour or two the job's done. Get me? Well, that's the stunt Tom does on the Carolina coast, and a fellow named Turner, who is with him, does the camera work. They're bunking at Cape Peril till they finish around there and then they'll move on somewhere else. Father hooked that job for him and he thought it would tickle the old man to invite me down. He sent word for me to pick two good old scouts for company, so you two rummies are my pickings. See?"

      "Pretty good pickings, too, eh, Legs?" observed Jimmy. "Sure your daddy's going to stop and bring us home in his yacht?"

      "That's what he promised," said Legs. "He'll let us know by the wireless Cat says they've got at Cape Peril. This is the eighteenth, isn't it? He ought to be leaving Tampico right about this time, but he's going to stop by Cuba for a couple of days or so."

      "Bet he's been having a swell time down ​there," affirmed Cat. "You're the slowest rummy I ever saw. Why in the name o' Heck didn't you make him take you with him? Bet your life, I'd gone if my dad had a clipper."

      "Nothing doing!" returned Legs. "It's something secret—about oil. He couldn't take any of the family only his friends. Dad sure is good to his friends. He wants 'em to put a lot o' money in oil lands down there."

      "Gee! I wish my daddy had a yacht," sighed Cat comically, "then I wouldn't have to go down on that blamed motorcycle with the coast guard. Wish Turner had brought the hydroplane up."

      "Jiminy! have they got a hydro down there, too?" asked Jimmy excitedly.

      "Sure they have. Didn't I tell you that? An airplane rigged up in a life preserver, that's what it looks like to me. They use it to survey the sounds and creeks around Cape Peril. Oh my, oh me, I see where I get a ride every day. You fellows, too, if you don't lose your nerve flying down to Seagulls' Nest."

      "Bet your sweet life, here's one scout that won't," asserted Jimmy valiantly.

      ​Legs, for the moment, was silent, thinking deeply.

      "And fellows, you know they used to use seaplanes in the war to hunt for submarines," explained Cat.

      "The mischief you say!" This from Jimmy.

      "Sure! The subs, even when they were 'way down deep, made sort of rings on the top of the water, and the flyers could spy 'em out with the airplanes, and find out where to drop the depth bombs and blow the stuffings out of them."

      "Golly!" exclaimed Jimmy.

      "I bet you can't guess what they use them for now?" Cat persisted with his instruction of his friends.

      "Search me!" returned Jimmy.

      "Use 'em to look for shoals of fish that make pretty much the same sort of circles that submarines do. When the flyer sees 'em he signals to the fishermen where to net 'em. How's that?"

      "Sounds fishy!" joked Jimmy.

      "Oh, mush! Is that the best you can do?" came from the disgusted Cat. "I don't waste any more breath on mutts like you. You'd just as soon spring that rotten joke about the ​fishermen and the salmon. They eat all they can, and what they can't, they can.'

      "Oh, no," denied Jimmy, "I canned that joke along with the other stale one about the lightship. Remember it! You tell a rube they raise all the vegetables they eat on that boat. Then the boob pops his eyes, and you explain they raise 'em from the row boat onto the deck."

      "Bury all those chestnuts and bury 'em deep," directed Cat, with a pained expression. "But, say, that reminds me—"

      "Just one more," interrupted Jimmy. "This is a bird for Legs. Say, Legs, know how long a fellow's legs ought to be? Don't know? Here's the answer. Just long enough to reach from his body to the ground. Hear that joke crack?"

      Jimmy pounded Legs, delightedly.

      "Put him out!" shouted Legs, at the same time giving his chum a shove that nearly landed him in the passageway. "You cribbed that joke from Adam. I heard that before you were born."

      "Bury that, too," directed Cat, when Jimmy had righted himself and was trying, in revenge ​for the upset, to flatten Legs's head against the window frame.

      "And listen here," he added, as if seized by a sudden inspiration. "Did you boys know that Blackboard used to scout around Cape Peril? Tell you what! Maybe we'll run across some buried treasure down there—doubloons and pieces-of-eight, shiver my timbers."

      "Who in thunder is Blackbeard?" asked Jimmy, becoming interested at once.

      "Gee! You never heard of Blackbeard? He was a fe-rocious pirate whose real name was Teach, from over in Accomac county on the Eastern Shore. He raised Cain with the merchant boats on the Virginia coast till the sea cops got on his tracks and he had to light out to Albemarle Sound. He operated down there for a while, till a ship from up this way jumped his boat and killed most of his men, and I bet you something pretty that those who got away hid their coin on the shore somewhere. Wouldn't it be funny if we ran across some of it?"

      "You're right it would! Where did you see that, Cat, in he newspaper?" queried Jimmy.

      "Golly Moses, Jimmy. You think you're ​funny. You know that was about two hundred years ago."

      "No, I didn't," asserted Jimmy. "I didn't know I was pulling a bone, swear I didn't."

      Visions of adventures began to float through the lads' fancies.

      "Oh, ye-ah, I remember!" exclaimed Legs with sudden enthusiasm. "Teach? By Jebo, he's the very fellow Stevenson—you know, the guy who wrote Kidnapped and Treasure Island—tells about in The Master of … Oh, shucks!"

      "Master of Oh Shucks!" jeered Cat.

      "Of Ball—Ball—Ball," Legs stumbled, "Oh yes, I know, The Master of Ballantre. The guy supposed to be telling the yarn was captured by pirates who ran up the black flag and made the skipper and 'most all the crew of the captured ship walk the plank, all except two or three. Then Teach blacked up his face and curled his hair in rings

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