The boy opened the note and read aloud for the benefit of his chum, who stood by eager-eyed and excited.
“‘Don’t leave this place with the machine. The gasoline is out, or nearly so.’”
“Is it written in Chinese?” asked Carl with a frown.
“Chinese, nothing!” exclaimed Ben. “It’s good honest English, and written in a pretty good hand at that!”
“Then that Chink wasn’t a Chink at all!” cried Carl.
“There are Chinamen who can read and write English,” suggested Ben.
“But this fellow pretended that he couldn’t even understand English.”
“I’d give a heap to know something about this puzzle,” Ben declared. “We find this fellow tied up in a smugglers’ cave one night, and the next morning we find him snooping about our camp, consuming our provisions and wasting our gasoline. That was a treacherous trick for him to play on us! I hope we’ll come across him some other day.”
“The question before the house right now,” Carl explained, “is how we’re going to get off this bald-headed old peak. We might be able to tumble down into one of the valleys below, but we wouldn’t be any better off there than we are here. Besides,” he went on, “our making our way down wouldn’t help us any with the machine.”
“If Jimmie would only show up with the Louise, now, we might borrow enough gasoline to get us back to level ground again. And still,” Ben went on, “we wouldn’t have fuel enough to do much racing until the tanks were filled. It’s a rotten scrape we’re in, and that’s no fairy tale.”