“We must organize a search at once,” declared the professor. “Following on the top of that warning last night, it begins to look ominous.”
“Maybe he has lost himself, and will find his way back before long,” suggested Ralph hopefully.
Coyote Pete gloomily shook his head.
“Jack Merrill ain’t that kind,” he said; “I tell yer, I don’t like the looks of it.”
“Why not fire guns so that if he is in the vicinity he can hear them?” was Walt Phelps’ suggestion.
“Yep, and bring the whole hornets’ nest down on our ears, provided they are anywhar near,” grunted Coyote Pete. “No younker, we will have to think up a better way than that.”
“Would not the search party I suggested be the best plan?” put in the professor.
“Reckon it would,” agreed Coyote Pete; “what you kain’t find, look fur,—as the flea said to ther monkey.”
But nobody laughed, as they usually did, at Pete’s quaintly phrased observations. There was too much anxiety felt by them all over Jack’s unexplained absence.