maker of Swift Enterprises. Tom asked Hank to take charge of the project in their absence. A few minutes later the two boys climbed into the plane and winged out over the eastern tip of the island, circled it once, then headed northeast.
Less than an hour later Tom banked and lost altitude. Flying close to the sun-flecked waves, he hugged the shore.
“There’ll be a red-striped lighthouse on the last point of land before we hit the bay we want,” he told Bud.
“I see it!” the copilot cried. “Looks like a big barber’s pole!”
Smoothly as a sea gull, the plane flew past the lighthouse and leveled toward the anchorage in one of the coves. A village of about ten houses hove into sight.
At the end of a spit of land was a small dock.
Tom set the amphibian down about half a mile out and taxied in. As Bud made her fast to the dock, the boys saw a lobsterman, who was busy dumping his morning’s catch into a square scow.
“Mighty fine plane you got there,” the man observed without turning around.
“We like it,” said Tom noncommittally, and asked if this was Hankton.
“That’s what we call it.”
“We’re looking for a man named Gray,” Tom said.
“The Grays is as thick around here as the pine trees,” the fisherman said dryly. “You’ll have to say which species you be after.”
“Arthur,” Tom replied calmly.
28 TOM SWIFT AND HIS ROCKET SHIP
“Oh, that one!” the lobsterman said. “He ain’t a local variety. But he ain’t exactly jest a summer person, either. He owns a pretty fair-sized house about quarter of a mile to the right up Cove Road. Looks like a hotel. You can’t miss it.