“We may find them together,” suggested Jerry.
“Then you believe the rustlers got him?” asked Bob.
“I can’t imagine what else could have happened to him. Of course he might have fallen, and been fatally hurt that night when he went away alone, and his call that someone had him might have been a delusion.
“But I prefer to think otherwise. If the rustlers got him they’d keep him pretty close, so he wouldn’t have a chance to escape. If anyone else caught him, say a party of hunters or cattlemen who might think him an escaped lunatic, as he has been suspected of being more than once, by this time they would have let him go. But as not a word has come from him I believe he is a prisoner of the cattle thieves.”
After some talk, Ned and Bob were of the same opinion as was Jerry, and then they began to discuss ways and means of conducting the search in the airship.
“Where are you heading for, Jerry?” asked Ned, as he saw the tall lad change the course of the airship, which at the start had flown due north from the ranch buildings.
“I thought it would be a good plan to go to the site of our old camp, and make that our real starting point. There’s a good landing place there, on top of the mountain, and there is just a possibility that the professor may have gone back there. We left a notice on a tree, you know, telling him, if he did come, to proceed at once to the ranch, leaving word on the reverse of our notice that he had done so.”
“Well, it’s a pretty slim chance, but let’s take it,” conceded Ned.
That the boys had not before used their airship to make an investigation on top of the mountain was due to the fact that in making a flight one day they had broken a wheel of the engine and had had to send to Chicago to have a new part made. The craft was now, however, in good running order.
The speedy airship was not long in reaching a point above the place where the camp had been made—the camp from which Professor Snodgrass had disappeared. Jerry, at the controls, sent the craft about in a spiral, bringing it lower and lower, for they had risen to quite a height.