'I do,' replied Snap, 'and you were right.'
'I was, sonny, and I am going to be right this time, too, when I tell you that Bull Pine Park is as good property now for the firm as if it were fenced and railed in, with a regiment of Nor'-West police picketed in every corner of it. Them Injuns—them confounded Crows—will never put their hoofs inside our reserve again, you bet!' and the old cowboy lay back and laughed long and low as he thought of his enemies and the scare they had had.
'Frank,' he said after a while, 'you couldn't draw a balloon, could you? Just a rough outline, you know—a sort of a bubble with a boat at the bottom?'
'Yes, Dick, how will that do?' replied Frank, scratching out the required figure in the ashes at his feet.
'That's the ticket; leastways, if no one has any objection, that's the brand of the firm. What do you say, Snap? It ain't easy to get a new brand nowadays, and that will remind us of how we got our range,' said Dick.
'So be it, Dick,' replied he; 'but we must not forget about these papers,' and, so saying, he drew from the inside of his shirt the papers which had been taken by him from the German aeronaut's box A.
'So you stuck to them all the time, did you, Snap?' asked Towzer; 'do you think there is anything in it?'
'Anything in what,' asked Snap; 'in the papers?'
'No, I mean is it worth while bothering about what the old man asks? Don't you think he was mad?'
'Mad or sane,' was Snap's answer, 'I am going to do what he asks us. It may not be a paying speculation to go over to Europe to carry out his bequest on the chance of what we shall get out of his "few little houses at Potsdam" and our share of the patents, but it is a plain duty to the man whose death was, under Providence, the means of saving all our lives.'