While Linda took time to call Miss Carlton on the long distance telephone, Louise insisted upon packing a lunch, and filling the thermos bottles with water and coffee. For she had never forgotten Linda’s first long flight when they had been stranded on a lonely prairie, far from food and civilization, and how grateful they had been then for the elaborate picnic lunch with which their hostess had supplied them.
“You’re a brick, Lou!” Linda cried, as she kissed her good-bye.
“Don’t forget to stop next week, on your way home!” Louise reminded her.
The Ladybug’s engine roared, and she taxied a short distance, soaring soon into the skies. To her joy Linda found that flying conditions had considerably improved since the previous day. The storm was clearing, and up above the clouds, the sun was shining. Linda’s way lay straight before her, and she flew on and on, keeping a sharp watch all the time for other planes, until the clouds beneath her had completely dispersed. Passing over Kansas, she left Wichita behind long before noon time, and pressed on through the northern part of Oklahoma—into Texas, the state in which her father’s ranch had been located, when she took that daring night-flight for the surgeon who saved his life. At last, by consulting her map, she felt certain she had reached New Mexico.
Both girls had been so thrilled in watching the country beneath them—so strangely different from the East—that they had not realized how late it was growing. Hunger finally drove Dot to consult her watch. To her surprise she found that it was after three o’clock.
“Let’s eat!” she said to Linda, through the tube. “I’m starved!”
“Where?” shouted Linda, surveying dubiously the ground beneath them, covered with dry bushes. There wasn’t a sign of civilization or cultivation anywhere about, and she had no desire to land.
“Right here in the plane,” returned Dot. “You haven’t forgotten the lunch Lou packed for us?”
“Good idea! And we’ll get to Albuquerque all the sooner. Something tells me that we’re not far off—if my calculations are correct.”
“Well, we can’t be lost,” replied Dot. “For we’ve been following the beacon lights straight along the way. O. K., then. I’ll unpack. Thank goodness Lou fixed a lunch.”