“Try with the glasses,” suggested the tall lad, passing to the merchant’s son a pair of powerful binoculars. “Maybe you can pick him up with those.”
Ned swept the horizon, and pointed the glasses to the zenith, taking in all the intervening space as well as he could. But the sight of a black speck, which could be focussed into a dirigible balloon, did not greet his eyes.
“Oh, well, he’ll come back sooner or later,” declared Jerry. “Perhaps he went farther than he intended to.”
“Sure, he’ll come back,” added Bob. “We do seem to have the greatest luck missing that man. Everywhere we go we are just too late.”
“I hope not this time,” said Ned in a low voice. “The only thing that’s worrying me is that he may have met with some accident, and——”
“Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed Jerry. “If there had been an accident we’d have heard of it. The grounds here are connected by telegraph with New York City and the whole country for that matter. In fact we’re only a few miles from New York. We must try a trip across it before we go back to Cresville.”
“That’ll make the people in the skyscrapers look out of the windows and get stiff necks,” predicted Bob with a laugh.
As they landed and made fast their craft, in a sheltered space set aside for them by the secretary of the meet, the boys were aware of some excitement around a small building near the committee offices.
“What’s going on over there I wonder?” asked Ned, as he saw a crowd running toward it, and surrounding a man in his shirt sleeves, who held a paper in his hand.