The scattered lights of the edge of Scottsville were just rushing beneath the aeroplane.
“I’ll follow the edge of town to the north,” went on Bud, talking almost aloud to himself. “When I come to the river and the bridge, I’ll head north and get down low enough to see the road. That’ll be my guide.”
Five miles to the north of Scottsville, lay Little Town—three saloons, a postoffice, a store and an elevator. Northwest from Little Town, a road reached into the “hills.” In any other part of the country these hills would have been hardly noticeable. But in Scott County, Indiana, they were comparatively mountains. Bud knew them as the scenes of many picnics and excursions.
At Camp’s Mill, about three miles from Little Town on the “hill road,” where a creek, a mill race and a head-gate afforded small water-power for a flour and saw mill, a dirt road turned sharply off to the north. Within a mile and in a thickly wooded region, the “hills” suddenly opened to enclose a pond. Little Town people called it Camp’s Lake. Visitors from larger places usually described it as a “frog pond.”
In the spring and summer, the shores of this little body of water—scarce a quarter of a mile long—were swamps full of cattails and spearmint. As Bud figured it, the damp, flat vegetation would now be dead and dry. To this secluded and seldom visited point, the youngster had decided to attempt to carry the stolen aeroplane. This was not wholly because the place was far from Scottsville. Bud had figured on all the problems he would have to face. That of making an ascent the next day bothered him a good deal more than the concealment of the airship. Here, he thought, he might be able to put into execution the only device he could figure out for starting the car on its flight again.
A sudden rumble beneath the car struck on Bud’s ears.
“That’s the bridge,” he said to himself. “It’s a team crossing the bridge.”
He could not mistake that sound; nor would any other Scottsville boy. Bridges may look a good deal alike, but no two of them sound alike. The hollow noise of a wagon on a bridge always strikes the same note. That note Bud had known for ten years. And, though the structure was out of sight, the boy brought the aeroplane as sharply about as if it had been day. It was now a straightaway course of five miles to Little Town due north.
When the town lights were a half mile or so behind him, the determined lad inclined his horizontal rudders until the ship sank close enough to the ground to reveal forms. A little lower, the dusty, white turnpike unwound beneath him, and then he steadied the craft. Not until then did he begin to feel somewhat composed.