LITMIR.BIZ

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      ​"I'm not, either. I'm having a swell time. Let me look, will you!"

      The fact is, as the flyer sped on her way without accident, the lads began to forget any sense of uneasiness and to give their minds wholly to the marvelous panorama of sea and sand below and boundless sky above.

      "Say, Legs," jested Jimmy, "I can see the rock of Gibraltar plain as day."

      "Your eyes are rum," countered Legs. "I can spy the Pyramids of Egypt."

      "High spy!" shot back Jimmy.

      "Oh, slush!"

      "Say, Legs, wouldn't our mothers be all up in the air if they knew we were up here now. Gee whillikins! Look at that toy steamship way down yonder. Looks to me like a terrapin crawling along smoking a cigarette. What does it look like to you."

      "Like a steamer."

      "Ah, come off, you haven't got any more imagination than a sand-fiddler."

      "I'm mighty thankful I haven't. You need to put a mustard plaster on yours. When I see a rattlesnake, I don't want to take it for a ​humming bird. Now dry up and let me look and enjoy myself. You are worse than the simp that talks all through the movies and won't let you get your mind on 'em. I'm not going to answer another blamed thing."

      In awed silence, the two lads, now forgetting themselves in the wonder of the experience, stared over at the great expanse of blue sea on their left—a sea of glass it appeared, with tiny spots that were vessels. On the horizon, the cloudless sky merged almost imperceptibly into the waters below.

      To the right, the sand hills were fringed by splotches of dwarfed forests, and beyond these lay a variegated pattern of level inland, with its marshy inlets and gleaming ponds.

      For a half hour the bird sped onward, and then suddenly the pilot cried, "Nearly there! See, there's Cape Peril and the lighthouse ahead!"

      The lads, thrilled to the soul, strained their eyes through the goggles. They saw a great bulge of seashore rather than a cape and near the middle of this arc, a toylike lighthouse. It seemed but a moment more before the machine ​began circling and the shore apparently flew up to meet them.

      The bird made an egg-shell landing on the firm level ground covered with a layer of windblown sand well back from the seashore and the dunes.

      Hardy vaulted out and inspected his passengers.

      "Well, boys, still alive and kicking! 'Fraid I'd find two corpses lashed to the mast like the skipper in the Wreck of the Hesperus."

      The lads were more like two spirited colts straining on their leashes. Any pallor that might have blanched their faces at the beginning of the ascent had given place to a vivid flush from the stinging wind and the excitement. Their eyes sparkled with the zest of a new and thrilling experience. Every exclamation and superlative in their vocabulary tumbled out in their effort to express their feelings.

      "Say, how about letting us loose?" finally asked Jimmy. "I'm tired of being hitched up to this flamingo."

      "Don't want to stay like the Siamese twins they used to exhibit in the side show, eh?"

      ​laughed Hardy as he helped them unbuckle the leathers.

      "Not with this thing. I'd look like a wart on a fishing pole."

      "Sure don't want any warts like you on me," growled Legs, climbing out after his short-legged companion.

      "Haven't got any flesh wounds from Jimmy's elbows, have you?" jested Hardy.

      "Flesh wounds!" sneered Jimmy. "He hasn't meat enough to make a flesh wound!"

      Hardy nipped off any disturbance that might have followed by directing the pair to help him shove his plane into a roughly constructed hangar some fifty yards away. This duty performed, the newcomers had a chance to take a closer look at the scene around them.

      The horizon, in the background, was fringed with stunted pine woods rising beyond a broad sterile, sandy plain. In the foreground, the gleaming blue of the ocean showed here and there between sand hills sparsely grown with long, waving yellow sand grass. Back of the hangar and extending for about a mile parallel with the beach, was a sort of lagoon, perhaps a ​quarter of a mile in width at its broadest point. From the surface of the lake at its nearer end rose a strange looking wooden structure that Hardy explained to be the hangar of the sea-plane. A short distance from the farther end of this unruffled body of water stood, on what seemed a vast mound in comparison with the sandy stretches about it, the gaunt and grim lighthouse of Cape Peril.

      "And here's Seagulls' Nest," announced the host, as he led his guests seaward and pointed to a spacious cottage, half weatherboarded and half shingled, rising from an elevated plot some two hundred yards in front of them.

      The Jamboree

       Table of Contents

      Layout 4

      ​

      CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      THE JAMBOREE

       Seagulls' Nest was the property of a group of city business men who used it as headquarters for the fall duck hunting and fishing season. Hence, it was readily leased by Hardy for the summer. Leaving out the kitchen ell, the lower floor formed dining-room, lounge, and library in one. Above stairs, one room was appropriated by Turner for developing his pictures and for his drawing work; another was Hardy's workshop; the other three were available for sleeping quarters.

      The whole establishment was furnished in the most rough-and-ready camping style. A long table of unfinished wood, nine or ten substantial chairs, a desk, a hanging set of bookshelves, and an improvised cupboard constituted the fittings of the living room. Its walls were adorned with horse, dog, and fish pictures along with a varied assortment of trophies of the chase. In the bedrooms above, were cots and little more. All ​bathing facilities were abundantly supplied by the ocean.

      "Hello, Mother Hubbard!" called out Hardy as the trio mounted the steps to the porch extending the length of the building's front. "Boys, there's my mascot, the only lady on deck, and I'd take my oath she's a witch."

      He pointed to a one-eyed coal-black cat sitting near the door and blinking her remaining optic in a way that showed but languid interest in the visitors.

      "And now, fellows," he added, as they entered the door, "here's our joint abode, so to speak. Make yourselves 'to hum,' as they say down East. You can bounce on the French furniture, shine up your knives on the damask tablecloth; prop your feet on the Italian mantelpiece, and do anything except monkey with Turner's junk upstairs. If you do that, you might as well get measured by the undertaker."

      In a moment, Luke, the cook, a powerful, good-natured looking mulatto, came in to greet the newcomers. He was plainly delighted at the arrival of company to liven up the loneliness. After his enthusiastic welcome, he was directed ​by Hardy to fetch the eatables from the airplane and prepare his very best dinner with all possible speed.

      Then appeared Turner, a tall, sandy-haired fellow of about twenty-five years, with a gaunt, solemn-looking face; "slow but sure" written in every line of his features.

      "Hello, Turner!" cried out Hardy. "Here are two of our Seaboard Airline patrol, Legs Hatton and Jimmy Todd. Our old friend Miller will blow in on the motorcycle about two hours from now. Fellows, this is Sockless Turner, a Tarheel from

      'Way down on the Pasquotank

       Where the bullfrogs jump from bank to bank.'"

      "And proud of it," asserted Turner as he gave the boys his most cordial pumphandle shake.

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