“Oh, I guess humanity would manage to stagger along some way, even without the joy of hearing your jokes,” said Dick. “The world got along fairly well before you came romping around with that phoney brand of humor, you know.”
“Yes, but then people didn’t know what they were missing,” said Tom, modestly.
“If they had known, wouldn’t they have been thankful?” retorted Dick, and before Tom could think of a suitable retort, he had opened the throttle, and the Arrow was once more soaring high above the green earth.
They flew in great sweeping circles, raking the hills and valleys below with their powerful fieldglasses, but saw nothing that would indicate the presence of the bandit stronghold. Noon came, and the boys decided to land, have lunch, and let the motor cool off awhile.
They landed in a grassy meadow, close to the edge of a forest of stunted trees. At the edge of the woodland flowed a little brook of clear cold water, and Phil and Tom agreed that Dick was a good picker of locations.
“There are plenty of big logs lying around to lean against, anyway,” said Dick. “There must have been a bad windstorm to knock so many trees down.”
“It’s queer, though, that they’re so much larger than any of the trees growing around here,” said Phil. “They feel mighty hard, too.”
He drew his hunting knife and tested the surface of the prostrate cylinders, but instead of its sinking into soft wood, it gave the gritty sound of steel scraping against stone.
“What the dickens is it, anyway?” asked Tom, in surprise. “It sounds like stone, but I’ll be blamed if I ever saw a rock that shape before. It looks like a big stone column.”
“It looks so much like one, that I think it is one,” said Phil.