If the truth must be told, both Ben and Carl experienced a sudden lifting of the hair as the Ann and the Bertha plunged toward the precipice hanging below the summit. It seemed for a time as if the wheels would never lift, but finally, at the last instant, they did so, and the level surface of rock was left below. The Japs who had been so neatly tricked seemed to the boys to be running around in circles and shooting useless bullets into the air up to the time the flying machine to which they had beckoned reached their side.
The third machine, however, did not remain long on the summit. The Japs, and the aviator conferred together for only a moment, and then, with the Japs watching, the planes were in the air again in swift pursuit of the Ann and the Bertha.
From the very first the boys saw that the pursuing machine was by no means fit for the race. In fact, she limped along at a pace not calculated to hold her own with a very ordinary aeroplane while both the Bertha and the Ann were very speedy machines.
Under these conditions the race could end in only one way. The Ann and Bertha passed swiftly toward Monterey, while the third machine returned to the summit where the two Japs had been left, to take them off, one at a time. The last the boys saw of her at that time she was settling limply down as if injured in a vital spot.
After the pursuit had ceased the boys dropped their machines to a government roadway which showed through the timber in a valley below. The gasoline supplied by the Japs to the Bertha was insufficient for a long run, and the idea in dropping down was to transfer fuel from the tanks of the Ann. Besides, the boys thought it best to consult together.
“The good old Ann!” shouted Carl, patting the great aeroplane as he would have petted a dog.
“I wish you could tell us exactly what has taken place in your vicinity since we last saw you in Westchester county,” said Ben, petting the Ann.
“I reckon she’d have some story to tell,” Carl suggested.
“You bet she would!” declared Ben. “The chances are that Mr. Havens started away from New York with her, and got sidetracked in some way,” he went on. “I hope he hasn’t been seriously injured.”
“I think we ought to go to Monterey,” Carl suggested, “and find out if there is any story going round of a lost aviator. If anything serious has taken place in this part of the country, we’ll certainly learn all about it there. Besides,” he went on, “we ought to buy more gasoline, and I want to eat. It seems to me something like a hundred years since I sat down to a square meal in a hotel or restaurant.”