“Well, I do, in a way,” answered Paul, with a feeble attempt at a smile, “but it isn’t just from curiosity. I envy you fellows. You’re always helping and I never find anything to do.”
“You can help me to-day,” laughed Colonel Howell. “I’m going to cap that gas well or bust it open in a new place. I’ll give you a job that may make both of us sit up and take notice.”
“Come on,” exclaimed Paul, seeming instantly to forget the mission of the machine. “I’ve been wanting a finger in that pie from the start.”
“Good luck to you,” called out Norman, as he sprang aboard the monoplane, and the colonel caught Paul laughingly by the arm and held him while Norman threw the big propeller into sizzling revolution.
The powerful car slid forward for the first time on its wooden snowshoes. As it caught the impulse of the great propeller, it sprang into the air and then dropped to the snow again with the wiggling motion of an inexperienced skater. Then, suddenly responding again to the propeller, it darted diagonally toward a menacing tree stump; but Norman was too quick for it. Before harm could result, the planes lifted and the airship, again in its native element, hurled itself skyward steadily and true.
It was an exhilarating flight. For the first time the boys got a bird’s-eye view of Fort McMurray and were surprised to find that the main settlement drifted down to the river in a long-drawn-out group of cabins. Few people were in sight, however, and all the world spread out beneath them as if frozen into silence. The big river continued its course between the same high hills and, as the last cabin disappeared, the boys headed the Gitchie Manitou directly for the top of the hills, where the plains began that led onward and onward until the sparse forests finally disappeared in the broken land of the Barren Grounds. And on these, not much farther to the North, they knew that caribou and moose roamed in herds of thousands, and that the musk ox, the king of the Northland big game, made his Arctic home.