“No wonder you laughed,” grinned Bob.
“When I first saw it I thought I had gone crazy, then I was sure and my giggling apparatus went wide open. Gee, to think, after all that traveling—millions of miles it seemed—then to come right back to the place we started from. Gosh all Friday, it’s like finding an everlasting cream puff. Whew—aint it a grand and glorious feeling!”
“I’ll say! If we had built our signal fire over there on the top of the ruin and Bradshaw had found us—the plane almost under our noses, howling catnip but he would have had a laugh on us. It was a close shave all right.”
“Suppose I go over the machine and you take a look at the other one. Shall we leave it here, or one of us fly it?” Jim asked.
“Don’t know that I’m so crazy about going in separate planes, Buddy, but they would surely think us nuts to leave one.”
“That’s what I was thinking. I’ll pilot one and you take the other. We can mark this section on the chart and have a doctor or someone sent back to get Mills. He’ll be all right for a few hours and it ought not to be hard to locate him, they can follow his trail of shells. He’ll probably spill the whole lot as he goes.”
“No sense in either of us trying to get him to civilization in one of the planes. If we leave him here, he might come out, just get enough sense to go up in it, then come down in a smash or run into some other machine.”
“Yes. Let’s get going.”
Whistling and chuckling spasmodically the Flying Buddies set to work and presently they had the foliage screen out of the way, had wiped the sticky bodies of dead butterflies off the propellers and other parts, examined the control boards, the gas tanks, and then made a tryout test to be sure that everything was as it should be.
“Oh, gee, this is great. All set, Old Man?”