“Don’t get gay, now!” Jimmie answered. “This is no funny business! If you’ll listen, you’ll hear the snakes creeping through the grass.”
The boys listened intently for an instant and then, without looking into the tents, sprang toward the machines. It seemed for a moment as if a thousand voices were shouting at them. They seemed to be in the center of a circle of men who were all practicing a different style of war-whoop.
To this day the boys assert that it was the whirling of the electric searchlights which kept the savages from advancing upon them. At any rate, for a time, the unseen visitors contented themselves with verbal demonstrations.
“We’ll have to jump out on the machines!” advised Glenn. “We can’t fight a whole army!”
“Why, there’s only two!” Jimmie taunted. “You said yourself that we saw all the black men there were in this neighborhood!”
“Aw, keep still,” Ben cried. “We haven’t got time to listen to you boys joke each other! Come on, Jimmie! You and I for the Louise!”
It was now very dark, for banks of clouds lay low in the valley, but the boys knew that the machines were situated so as to run smoothly until the propellers and the planes brought them into the air. They had provided for that on landing.
With a chorus of savage yells still ringing in their ears, the boys leaped into their seats, still swinging their searchlights frantically as their only means of protection, and pressed the starters. The machines ran ahead smoothly for an instant then lifted.
The next minute there was absolute silence below. The boys were certain that if they could have looked down upon the savages who had been so threatening a moment before they would have seen them on their knees with their faces pressed to the ground.
“They’ll talk about this night for a thousand years!” Jimmie screamed in Ben’s ear as the Louise swept into and through a stratum of cloud. “They’ll send it down to future generations in legends of magic.”