“That was a bad miscalculation I made regarding my gasoline. I thought I had enough to last me several hours. I had intended to fly only an hour or two by moonlight. I was right over the mountains when I discovered the condition of my gasoline, and you can imagine the state of mind it threw me into. All the ghosts I had cut through in the air hadn’t begun to chill me the way this did. Fifty thousand icicles stuck down my back wouldn’t have been a circumstance to this.
“It was so dark down on the earth, in spite of the moon, that I could hardly distinguish mountains from valleys. I was flying five hundred feet over the highest peaks, and began to glide as soon as I discovered my predicament.
“Presently I saw a large gulch that you call Mummy Cañon right below me. So I banked and circled around without realizing that I was so near the mountain I was searching for. But when about fifty feet from the ground a couple of my stay wires broke and warped the left wing. I worked my ailerons in an endeavor to balance the machine, but it was no use. Down she flopped, and I leaped. I don’t know how I managed to get clear of the struts and the planes, but I did, and—well, it was mighty lucky you folks were near, or I’d have died a lonely death. Probably nobody would’ve come that way until I was food for the crows.”
“What became of your specimens?” inquired the doctor. “Didn’t you have any with you, or hadn’t you gathered any yet?”
“Oh, my, yes!” replied Miles. “I’d been in the mountains several weeks. Didn’t you find them?”
“No. Where did you drop them?”
“They were in a leather bag tied to one of the struts near my seat. It’s mighty funny you didn’t find them.”
“Maybe the bag was broken loose when the machine struck the ground, and was thrown some distance away,” suggested the doctor.
“That might be, but I should think one of all those boys would have found it when they went after the aeroplane.”
“Yes, I should think so, too, unless it fell into a hole or behind a big rock. Were the contents of the bag valuable?”