Bright and early next morning the Wizard again left the city and spun out along Bonnet Trail. Merriwell had cashed a check at the desk before starting and so was supplied with funds. Yet he was anxious to obtain his bill case more for the papers it contained than for anything else; and besides, it would serve him as a sufficient excuse for trying to locate Randolph.
Again the car was driven over to the side of the trail and the coil plug removed. Again the two friends hurried up the narrow, mountain track which led to the mysterious house of stone.
In the bright glare of the morning sun it did not look so gloomy and desolate as it had the night before; but it was still quite grim and forbidding enough, with its blank expressionless windows and absolute lack of sound or life.
Merriwell had hardly expected any response to his repeated poundings on the metal door, and he was not disappointed. He might have spared himself the effort.
When he was finally satisfied that there was no possibility of effecting an entrance, he turned his attention to the cliffs above the house, from which the aëroplane had appeared. A glance told him that they were insurmountable. For the greater part of their height they were almost as smooth as glass, and the top ledges overhung the plateau in such a manner as to make an attempt at climbing them out of the question.
“I’d certainly like to get up there,” he remarked. “But there’s nothing doing from here.”
“Do you think the flying machine is up there, pard?” Buckhart inquired.
“That’s what I want to find out,” Merriwell returned, “I shouldn’t be surprised if it were.”
He stepped to the edge of the ravine from which Randolph had appeared the afternoon previous, but though a faint outline of a path showed among the rocks, it turned abruptly away from the cliffs and followed the course of a little stream as far as the eye could reach.
“Let’s take the car and go up the trail a bit,” Dick said, as he turned from the ravine. “Perhaps we can find some way to climb up the mountains in that direction.”