CHAPTER VIII.
THE LOSS OF A BOY!
“They seem to be celebrating our arrival,” Ben said, looking down on the signal fire with a grin, “only I don’t hear any bands,” he continued, as the flames streamed up and cast a red light over the waters of the Pacific ocean.
“That’s about the strangest proposition I ever came across,” Carl said, looking down on the dark canyons, laying like black lines in a drawing, on the landscape below. “I’d like to know what it means.”
“Don’t you ever think,” Jimmie went on, “that Phillips and Mendoza have anything to do with that fire! That beacon light was put there for some purpose by an entirely different set of outlaws.”
“But why ‘outlaws’?” asked Carl. “The people we see about the fire may be fishermen, and there are lime quarries and kilns somewhere in this section, and these men may be signaling to schooners.”
Below the aeroplanes lay a great peak extending four thousand feet above the level of the sea. To the west the Pacific beat fiercely against its side. To the south the Sierra raised its lofty crags, apparently, straight out of the ocean. To the north a succession of summits lifted above the range. Off to the east lay a faint trail connecting, by devious turns and twists through the mountain wilderness, with the Southern Pacific railroad.
The beacon fire rose straight from a headland which jutted for some distance out into the ocean. The beat of the waves against the breakers at the foot of the headland came dimly up to the boys like the stir and rustle of a crowded street.
There had been a fog, but it was lifting now, and here and there traces of green might be seen wherever the flames revealed the surface of the ground. After a time Ben turned back with the Bertha and signaled to the others to help in the search for a safe landing-place.
This was by no means an easy task, as it was deep twilight now on the lower stretches of the mountain, and most of the canyons seemed mere yawning pits whose open mouths gaped eagerly for the prey in the air.