“Gosh!” said Terry, after a while.
“Only women there—and children,” Jeff urged excitedly.
“But they look—why, this is a civilized country!” I protested. “There must be men.”
“Of course there are men,” said Terry. “Come on, let’s find ’em.”
He refused to listen to Jeff’s suggestion that we examine the country further before we risked leaving our machine.
“There’s a fine landing place right there where we came over,” he insisted, and it was an excellent one—a wide, flat-topped rock, overlooking the lake, and quite out of sight from the interior.
“They won’t find this in a hurry,” he asserted, as we scrambled with the utmost difficulty down to safer footing. “Come on, boys—there were some good lookers in that bunch.”
Of course it was unwise of us.
It was quite easy to see afterward that our best plan was to have studied the country more fully before we left our swooping airship and trusted ourselves to mere foot service. But we were three young men. We had been talking about this country for over a year, hardly believing that there was such a place, and now—we were in it.
It looked safe and civilized enough, and among those upturned, crowding faces, though some were terrified enough, there was great beauty—on that we all agreed.