Jimmie scrambled up the slope, clinging to rocks and roots with both fingers and feet, and ran toward the blaze. Ned watched the little fellow dashing along with no little anxiety, for the outlaws might be there in the thickets, watching for some attempt to be made to lift the aeroplane.
He saw Jimmie recklessly climb to the top of a great rock which jutted out from the side of the mountain and saw his figure outlined against the growing blaze on the slope above. Then the fire died down, as if for want of material, and the top of the rock could no longer be seen.
Ned listened, but Jimmie did not return. The effort to create a general conflagration on the mountain side had evidently failed, for there was little to burn save the green boles of trees, that section having been swept by fire a year before.
Not daring to leave the aeroplane for even an instant, Ned awaited the return of the boy with premonitions of trouble in his mind. Presently he heard a shot, then a cry, and after that a brutal laugh. The outlaws were nearer than he thought.
There was only one thing for Ned to do, and that was to get the aeroplane into the sky immediately, and so once more place it beyond the reach of the outlaws. There was nothing he could do to aid Jimmie, he reflected, sadly, by remaining there.
It was no task at all to start the rollers down the incline, but the cañon threatened if he did not get it off the ground in quick time. He knocked the stones out from under the wheels and sprang into his seat. The machine, gaining momentum, moved on sedately. It had acquired a fair rate of speed when he came within a few feet of the cañon.
Then, after letting it get all the headway possible in that confined space without coming too close to the cañon, Ned pulled the lever which tilted the front rudder planes. Trifling as the deflection was the man-made bird felt its influence and rose from the slope as if endowed with life.
It reached the edge of the descent some distance in the air, and the boy was congratulating himself on the success of his unaided rise when the big machine began to sag as if dropping to the ground, five hundred feet below.
The west wall of the cañon ran straight down, and it seemed to Ned that he was following it, like an iron spike thrown off the ledge. He knew very well what had occurred. He had fallen into one of the down-tipping currents so frequent in mountain districts.
The air, he knew, was sliding down the precipice just as water tumbles over a dam. If it turned, as it might, when it struck the lower strata of air, he might secure control of his machine and manage to lift it out of the cañon. If it did not, he would doubtless fall to the rocky floor of the cañon, and lie there until some chance hunter or forester came upon a heap of bleaching bones and the wreck of an aeroplane.