Up the aeroplane went, and still higher up. Jimmie saw the great divide below, and saw little red specks in the forests of the eastern slope which denoted forest fires not yet grown to maturity. After passing the summit Ned saw the campfire of the men Ernest had spoken of. He passed them, swung around a circle lower down, selected a spot where he thought he could land with safety, and dropped down.
Jimmie declared afterwards that he felt as if he had been thrown out of the window of a twenty-story building—and the highest window at that. When the aeroplane came into the shadows of the high trees where the landing was being made he knew that a wind was blowing at the surface and feared that the machine would be carried along on the ground and dumped over into a cañon.
The machine sank gracefully into a glade rather high up on the slope, and the boys alighted to stretch their legs. Ned’s first move was to see if there was plenty of room for him to get out. What he found was an incline to the east, an incline ending at a great cañon, into which he would have been hurled had the aeroplane run fifty feet farther on the ground.
“I think I can make it,” he said, “but it is risky. It wouldn’t be nice to take a header a thousand feet down.”
After the inspection of the locality Ned extinguished all the lights and sat down to map out his plans for the remainder of the night. There were the usual noises of the forest, as found at night, but no human sounds intruded.
Ned knew that the clamor of the engine must have been heard by the men in the camp he had flown over, and he had no doubt that the outlaws would make a quick excursion to his landing place, if they could determine where it was. So he put out the lights and listened for some indication of the approach of the others.
“They won’t find us in a thousand years,” Jimmie volunteered, as the two sat close together under a great tree.
“I hope not,” Ned replied, “for then we shall have a better chance to find them.”
“What do you want to find ’em for?” questioned the boy. “You can’t pinch ’em, ’cause you haven’t got the proof, an’ you couldn’t if you had the proof, ’cause there ain’t enough of us. They’d eat us up like spinach.”
“You are right as far as you have gone,” Ned replied, “but you have not gone far enough. What I want now is to find out what they are doing here. And, also, I want to find out about that fellow from San Francisco. If the description is any good, he was in the city when I left it, and I don’t see how he ever got here so soon. I came part way on an aeroplane, but it seems that he traveled farther and beat me out.”