XXVI
CRATER LAKE
Along about an hour after Perk had made his lonesome midday lunch and marveled at the fact of his being able to only devour three of those toothsome sandwiches the chef at the hotel had put up at his order, things had arrived at such a point that Jack felt it was only the part of wisdom for him to do whatever lay in his power to keep track of their bearings.
If that rising wind kept on increasing in strength so that it even threatened to wind up in a genuine smashing gale, the chances were they must either make some sort of a forced landing, or else climb up above the storm clouds so as to avoid new and more appalling perils.
In so doing they would lose track of their points of contact and be compelled to go all over the same ground again or take chances of picking up the broken thread of their search wherever they had to drop it.
Thus hard set, Jack began to try and take note of various unusual formations—using the binoculars in so doing—that, stamped on his receptive mind might serve as landmarks just as “targets” do the harbor pilots when fetching a deep sea vessel in through the shallows to port and safety.
Sometimes small fishing smacks, driven from a promising field by wind and huge billows, are able to mark the spot by an anchored empty water keg and in this way are able to find the fruitful spot when the weather moderates. Such a stratagem however is not available to the air voyager, whose only resource lies in a retentive memory.
When another half hour had slipped by, Jack began to once again entertain a hope that this emergency might not reach a culmination. If anything, the wind had lost a modicum of its fierceness and twice he discovered a little break in the cloud ceiling by which they were covered, as though the sun were trying to peep through.
Thus things were going along as the middle of the afternoon was reached. Perk at the controls was mentally comparing their condition to that of a shipwrecked crew of a sunken vessel; out of water with their hearts almost in their throats with anxiety, shading their eyes with their hands and searching along the horizon for signs of a sail. Somehow the comparison gave Perk much concern, and he tried to imagine the great joy that must fill the souls of that forlorn little company when suddenly one of their number shouts out the glorious news: “Ship ahoy—a steamer’s smoke smudge to larboard!”
But it was only Suzanne asking Jack to please take a look and tell her what that lumbering, ungainly object might be which she had discovered moving across the rocks under the keel of the flying boat.
“I never happened to run across one before,” Jack presently explained, “but I’m sure it must be a Mountain Charlie, as I understand people out in California call the silvertip grizzly bear. Some monster in the bargain, Miss Cramer and you’ll agree with me when I say I’d rather be here than there.”