“That’s right!” exclaimed Harvey Brill. “Oh, I’m going to make good, or I’ll go off grub-staking again and discover another pocket of gold. I won’t see your folks done out of their money!” He seemed to feel his responsibility.
Professor Snodgrass began getting his apparatus ready for catching alive the luminous snakes, and it was arranged to take him a little way up the valley in the motorship, leave him, and then proceed on the gold hunt.
The gas machine was set going, and with only enough of the powerful vapor in the big bag to lift the craft above the highest of the big rocks that were strewn over the valley, they set off. Professor Snodgrass alighted about two miles from their first camping place, and at once began an eager search for new specimens. Then the others went slowly on.
“A rock that looks like a church; eh?” mused Ned, who had replaced Jerry at the steering wheels. “Well, there are all sorts and shapes of rocks here, you can take your choice.”
“I picked out that one,” explained the miner, “as I thought it was so big that nothing would ever move it. I hid the gold in a sort of stone pocket at the foot of it.”
Eagerly they peered about for a sight of the great stone that would mark the hiding place of the nuggets. Mr. Brill had a general idea of where he had cached his fortune, and said they would not reach it much before passing the center of the valley.
“But we’d better take no chances,” he added; “for the landslide may have shifted things so that I’d pass over the spot before I knew it. So go slow, and we’ll look all along the way.”
Several times he thought he saw, in the distance, the big “church-rock” of which they were in search, and the airship would be sent to it, only to disappoint the searchers. For, when they got nearer the boulder, its form would change.
“That isn’t it,” Harvey Brill would say, and they would start off again.