Page:Bedford-Jones--Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril.djvu/43

 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