“You don’t say so!” exclaimed Sledge Hammer Tod. “That’s going some.”
“Have you seen anything of Noddy Nixon or his gang?” asked Ned.
“No, and I don’t want to,” replied Jim Nestor. “I received your letters and telegrams, saying he might make trouble, but he hasn’t showed up here yet, but when he does, why, Tod and I are ready for him, aren’t we, Sledge Hammer?”
“That’s what,” and the old miner, who was several years the senior of Nestor, clenched a brawny fist.
“Tod’s my new foreman,” went on Jim. “The work got so heavy I had to have help.”
“Then the mine’s doing well?” inquired Jerry.
“Couldn’t be better.”
Jerry’s face showed the relief he felt. “Well, what kind of a trip did you have?” went on Nestor. “Land sakes, I never see such boys! First you come all the way out here in an auto, and locate a mine I thought was as good as gone. Then you come in an airship. Next I s’pose you’ll be growing wings, and flying without any apparatus whatever.”
“Hardly, yet awhile,” commented Jerry, who then went into detail about the trip, telling of Noddy’s theft of the airship, and how they had stopped on their way to carry the cable across the river.
“But the funny part of it was,” went on Jerry, “that when Noddy stole our airship, we have every reason to believe that there was with him an old man, who you will remember, Jim. He was Jackson——”