After a short discussion it was decided that Bob and Pete should cycle back to The Jones Salvage Yard for the supplies while Jupe stayed with the stranded whale.
After the other two had gone, Jupiter searched the flotsam on the beach until he found a battered plastic bucket that would still hold water. For the next half hour, while he waited for his friends, he spent his time trudging out to the edge of the sea, filling the bucket, then trudging back and emptying it over the stranded whale.
The First Investigator had never much enjoyed physical work. He preferred to use his brain. “About time,” he said crossly when the other two Investigators came back, although as a matter of fact they had been surprisingly quick.
They had brought all the things he had asked for — a long roll of tarpaulin, the hand pump, a good sharp spade, and a hose.
“Let’s dig as close to the whale as we can,” Jupe directed. “Then maybe we’ll be able to roll it over into the pool.”
Pete, who was the strongest of the three, did most of the digging. Luckily the damp sand under the surface was quite soft. In less than an hour they had made a trench about ten feet long, two feet wide, and almost two feet deep.
They lined the trench with the tarpaulin to make it watertight. Then Pete worked the pump from the edge of the sea while Bob and Jupe stretched the long hose to the pool. It was a good pump that had probably once belonged aboard a fishing boat. They soon had almost two feet of water in the trench.
“Now comes the hard part,” Jupiter said.
“Thanks a lot,” Pete told him. “I hope that means you’ll do your share of the work this time.”
Jupe didn’t bother to answer him. It seemed to him he had already done more than his share. The whole plan had been his idea.
After they had rested a moment, the Three Investigators gathered on the side of the whale away from the pool. They leaned forward and rested their hands against the animal. It lay there without moving, its eyes closed. Bob patted its head. It opened its eyes at once, and Bob could have sworn it smiled at him.
“Now, when I say ‘heave,’ ” the First Investigator said. “Are you ready? All together —”
He never finished his command. As the three boys strained, ready to heave, the whale seemed to be straining, too, gathering itself. With a sudden convulsive movement of its body it flipped itself up, turning, spinning in the air, and landed on its back in the pool.
“Wow!” Bob exclaimed. Jupe and Pete were excited too.
Once in the water the whale righted itself. It submerged for a minute, wallowing in the pleasure of being in its own element again, then floated slowly to the surface and spouted up a single jet of water from its blowhole. It was exactly as though the whale were thanking them.
“Now, when the tide comes in —” Jupiter began.
“Never mind the tide,” Pete interrupted him. “It must be nine o’clock now! We promised to work at the junkyard this morning. And I haven’t even had my breakfast yet.”
Jupiter’s uncle Titus Jones and his aunt Mathilda, with whom he lived, ran The Jones Salvage Yard on the outskirts of Rocky Beach. The three boys often worked in the yard, sorting and repairing the old furniture, scrap iron, and odds and ends of machinery that Uncle Titus was always buying.
Hastily they said goodbye to the whale.
“Take care of yourself and keep wet,” Bob told it. “We’ll be down early this afternoon to see you get back in the ocean.”
The three boys put on their socks and sneakers, picked up the pump, the spade, and the hose, and hurried off. They were at the top of the cliff, retrieving their bicycles, when Jupiter heard a sound behind them.
About two miles offshore a small outboard cabin cruiser was chugging slowly past. There were two men on board, but the boat was too far away to see what they looked like.
Then Jupe saw a flash of light from the boat, then another and another.
“Looks like they’re signaling,” Pete said.
The First Investigator shook his head. “There’s no pattern to the flashes,” he said. “My deduction is that one of those men is using a pair of binoculars, and those flashes are the reflection of the sun on the lenses.”
It sounded reasonable and ordinary enough to the other two Investigators, but Jupe didn’t pick up his bike. He was still watching the boat, which was turning toward the shore now.
“Come on,” Pete told him impatiently. “Stop trying to make a mystery of everything. Hundreds of people along this coast go out every day to look at the gray whales.”
“I know,” Jupe agreed as they pushed their bicycles toward the road. “But the man on that boat wasn’t watching the whales. He had his glasses turned the wrong way. Toward the shore. In fact, it seemed to me that he was watching us.”
“Maybe he saw us save the whale,” said Bob indifferently, and Jupe dropped the matter.
Jupe’s Aunt Mathilda was waiting for them when they reached the salvage yard. She was a kind, cheerful woman who enjoyed living in the small coastal city and running the junk business with her husband. She enjoyed having Jupe live with them, as he had ever since his parents had died. But the thing she enjoyed most in life was putting the boys to work.
“You’re late,” she greeted them as they cycled into the yard. “I suppose you’ve been busy with one of your puzzles again.”
Jupiter had never explained to his aunt that he and Bob and Pete were serious investigators, taking on professional cases for all kinds of people who needed their services. Aunt Mathilda thought they were just members of a club that met to solve riddles they found in newspapers and magazines.
The boys put in several hours’ hard work in the junkyard before Aunt Mathilda gave them their lunch and told them they could have the rest of the day off.
It was after three before the Investigators reached the cove again. The tide was coming in fast over the sand. They left their bicycles at the top of the cliff and hurried down to the beach.
Pete, who could run faster than the other two, was the first to reach the pool. He stopped abruptly, his back stiffening with dismay, as he stared down into it.
Jupiter and Bob joined him. They were dismayed, too, when they saw what Pete was staring at.
The improvised pool was still there in the dry sand. And it was still full of water. But that was all there was in it.
The little whale had vanished!
“Maybe it managed to flip itself onto the beach,” Pete said, “and worked its way back into the ocean somehow.”
He didn’t sound as if he believed his theory himself.
“I hope so,” Bob said. But there was no hope in his voice. The whale would have had to travel a long way before it reached water deep enough to swim in.
Jupe didn’t say anything. He had moved away from the pool and was pacing in circles, staring down at the sand.
“One truck,” he said thoughtfully, returning to the others. “With a four-wheel drive. It came down from the road and across the beach. Then it backed up to the pool. It stayed there long enough to sink several inches into the soft sand. Someone had to put boards under the front wheels to get it moving again. Then it drove back to the road.”
Jupe showed his friends the crisscrossing tracks on the beach, the sharp dents left by the boards. They could see he was right. The whole thing even seemed obvious to them now. But then Jupe’s deductions often did seem obvious once he had explained them to you.
“Maybe someone reported the stranded whale,” Pete suggested after a moment. “And they sent some men down to rescue it.”
“Good reasoning,” Jupe told him approvingly. When he said that, it usually meant he had just been thinking the same thing himself. “Now, if someone saw a whale swimming around in a homemade pool on the beach, who would they call, I wonder?”
He did not wait for an answer. He was already walking back to their bicycles. Pete and Bob rolled up the tarpaulin and followed him.
“Ocean World.” Jupiter answered his own question a half hour later. “That’s who they’d probably call.”
The Three Investigators were sitting in their Headquarters in the junkyard.