“Then your friends have set the fires!” Greer shouted, against the wind. “I have been suspicious of you all along—ever since you failed to satisfactorily account for the absence of your friends. It is all very well for you to come here in an aeroplane and start a conflagration! But how do you think that we, who are not so well provided with means of getting away, are to escape death?”
Pat drew back his hand, as if to strike the fellow, but Jack restrained him.
“You set the fires!” Pat shouted, then. “You set it through your fellow conspirators! I saw you signaling to the cañon!”
“You’re no more a forester than I am!” Jack added. “You’re a scoundrel, and ought to be sent to prison for life.”
There was no more talk for a time. Greer stood defiantly against the wall of rock to the east, as if fearful of an attack from behind, his right hand in his bulging pocket. The boys knew that he had a weapon there, and their own hands were not empty.
The aeroplane drew and shivered in the rising gale, but now little attention was paid to it. Pat and Jack were listening for some indication of the return of Ned and Frank. No farther fable of a man with a lantern was necessary, for fire was racing up the western slope, heading directly for the plateau and the priceless aeroplane. Down in the cañon the flames were leaping from tree to tree. A stifling smoke filled the air, always in swift motion, but stifling still.
CHAPTER V.—THE REVELATION OF A TRAGEDY.
“Smugglers!” Frank exclaimed, dropping an armful of unopened opium tins on the floor of the cavern. “Smugglers, all right, all right!”
Ned looked the tins over carefully. They were well covered with Chinese characters, and were dirty, as if they had been hidden away in the earth for a long time.
“Who would have suspected it?” Frank continued. “We are close to the British frontier, but, all the same, this seems to me to be an awkward place to land and store the dope stuff.”