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He had a long, slim tail that carried vicious barbs along the base of its upper side. It was from the barbs, which served as defensive weapons, that the name sting ray, or stingaree, derived. The ray was harmless to men unless one chanced to step on him as he lay resting on the bottom ooze. At such rare times, his tail would lash up, inflicting a serious and painful wound.
Don Scott, asleep at full length on the houseboat's sun deck, which was also its cabin top, awoke in time to see the dark shape reenter the calm water. "Stingaree!" he exclaimed. Rick had never seen an area more teeming with life than Chesapeake Bay, unless it was the jungles of the South Pacific.
Or catches a ride on an eagle's tail feathers. Take your choice." "I've got a better way. The stingaree poses for his picture. The picture is used as a model for making a kite, probably of black plastic. The kite gets flown in the wind." Scotty stared. "Maybe just maybe you've got something there. The stingaree shape would make a good kite. Could what you saw have been a kite?" "It's possible."
And so it turned out, for in a day's fishing over at Sausalito Tom caught many silver smelt and tomcod, with flat, ugly flounders, and a red, big-eyed rock-cod. The frightened boy almost fell out of the boat, too, when he pulled in a large sting-ray, or "stingaree," as the boatman called it.
Neither he nor Scotty believed in flying saucers at least, not in saucers that kidnaped people, and the object Rick had seen had not been saucer-like. It had been shaped like a stingaree. Stingarees don't fly. Rick smiled to himself. During another vacation, skin diving in the Virgin Islands, he and Scotty had proved that octopuses don't wail.
"Any flying saucer tries to pick us up, the pilot will catch one of his six legs in it." "Likely," the man agreed. "You catch one, bring it to the Narrows, will you? Always wanted to see one at close range." "We'll do that," Rick agreed, and no premonition or hunch warned him how close he and Scotty would come to carrying out the promise. The Flying Stingaree
Rick nodded. "The wind was funneling down the creek pretty fast, and it would have carried a big kite. There's only one small difficulty. Why launch a kite that has no string?" "You certain it didn't have a string?" "In that wind, the string would have had to be a cable. I'd have seen it, and maybe felt it. The kite stingaree, that is just missed. Of course, the string might have broken."
His mistress happened to take a walk that evening and beheld Adolphus the perfidious, not sitting by a dying grandmother, but tripping the light fantastic in a nipa shack, eight by twelve. She forthwith discharged Adolphus, and even levied on the services of a friendly constabulary officer to thrash him with a stingaree, or sting ray cane.
Someone had turned the boat loose, idled down to its lowest speed. The stable crab boat had continued on course, heading out the mouth of the Little Choptank into the wide bay. Only a bloodstain showed that there had been violence aboard. The flying stingaree had claimed another victim! Steve Waits It Out
This time he caught the rocket, and both hands gripped tight. The flying stingaree lifted him, dragging him through the water. Rick spun around at the end of the line, and caught a glimpse of the bodyguard raising a pistol to shoot at him! Then the scene whirled and he saw Scotty, standing in water to his waist, spear gun lifted to fire.
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