Again and again she would stop in her movements as if to concentrate her scrutiny upon one particular spot; Jack, watching with sympathy filling his heart, could imagine how the poor girl must be suffering even though failing to show it. He would feel a spasm of eagerness on each occasion of special scrutiny only to lose it again as she continued her search of the grim countryside that was so bleak and so unpromising.
Meantime Jack was keeping one eye on the lower heavens, with the expectation of sooner or later discovering some far distant moving object, that he would know must be some other air craft, doubtless engaged in the same mission of humanity and mercy that employed all their own efforts.
It turned out that he had not held these expectations in vain, for along about the middle of the morning such a tiny blur was discovered far away, which grew somewhat larger as the minutes passed.
Upon calling the girl’s attention to the moving object that to the unaided eye might just as well have been set down as a wheeling buzzard, she quickly pronounced it to be a plane, sweeping at a low altitude above the rocky mountain peaks, as though those aboard were scrutinizing the depths and heights that lay underneath, just as she had been doing.
She cast frequent eager glances in that direction, while not allowing her interest in the wild terrain over which they continued to pass, to slacken. Jack could detect a certain wistfulness in the way she watched, just as though she might be wishing them all the favors of Heaven in meeting with success.
The ship swung around, and went off in another direction, as though the pilot might be following out certain ideas of his own. While it was yet in plain sight, though growing fainter in the lower haze, she uttered a low cry, and said excitedly:
“Oh! look Jack, look over in the north—another ship, and a cabin biplane at that. Do you think they are working on the same lines as the rest of us?”
Jack reached out a hand for the binoculars, and took a good survey; after which he announced that everything seemed to point that way.
“They’re keeping low down, also moving quite slowly; and if on a regular flight they would be doing neither of those things, you understand. Yes, and I have no doubt that within a hundred-and-fifty miles of this spot in every direction there are twenty—thirty such ships, large and small, with each pilot doing everything in his power to be the lucky one to find your Buddy.”
She continued to observe the two planes as if lost in serious thought, to finally say with a little catch in her voice, for she still had the earphone harness attached to her head: