So far, the only thing that had bothered him was the fear that he might not be able to get away with the aeroplane successfully. Now he had time to think of something just as important.
“I wonder what they’ll think?” Bud finally asked himself. Then he recalled how President Elder had reprimanded him for taking chances with the car.
“Whew,” whistled the lad, as the thought came back to him, “like as not, he’ll be sore all over now. And what if I do land her all right and get her going again to-morrow? I can’t come down at the fair-ground or the sheriff’ll nab me. I might as well have stayed. If I go back and give the show and sail away again without landin’—and that’s the only thing to do—where’ll I go? They can watch me and follow me. I can get more gasoline somewhere, but I can’t hide out another night with the sheriff and Mr. Stockwell and Mr. Dare on my track.”
With this new trouble bothering him, he held his course toward Little Town. Once, like a great, black, groaning bird, he shot over a buggy. The horse shied, and there were several alarmed imprecations from the occupants.
“Lucky they didn’t shoot,” thought Bud. “But I can’t fly higher and know where I am.”
Bud’s selection of Camp’s Lake as a desirable spot for his purpose showed how familiar he was with the country in all directions about Scottsville. His familiarity with this particular place was due to the fact that his father’s farm had been just south of Little Town. Camp’s Mill and its old-fashioned water wheel had always been Bud’s joy. And Josh Camp was still one of his boy chums. Or he would have been had Bud remained near Little Town.
He and Josh had, in earlier years, a firm belief that fish existed in Camp’s Lake. They had never been able to absolutely prove this, but many a night’s work with a lantern had proven that, if the pond were devoid of fish, it was infested with bull frogs of giant girth. The final argument in bringing the flying boy to his old stamping grounds was this.
Camp’s Lake, whether lake or pond, was never devoid of water. Even beyond its margins, the swampy cattail beds oozed moisture. At the head of the body of water was a spring which flowed ceaselessly. At the foot of the lake, at one time, the surplus water drained away through the lower marsh ground to the creek feeding the mill-pond, a mile away at Camp’s Mill.
As the country cleared up and the supply of water in the creek became less certain, Josh’s father—who owned the land about Camp Lake—determined to utilize the supply going to waste there. Accounts of water storage in western irrigation districts had inspired this. The last time Bud saw the place, he found that Mr. Camp had dammed up the spillway at the end of the lake. In the center of the dam, he had built a head-gate; and, from this, leading over the marsh, he had constructed a flume about four feet wide leading to the creek below.
“The place behind the hills is a good place to hide,” thought Bud, reviewing the situation, “the flat shores of the pond are the best place to land without breaking anything, and the old flume is the best starting apparatus I can think of.”