"What I say is true and when you hear my name you will perhaps realize that fact. I am George Desmond the American explorer."
"The George Desmond who was lost in 1870?" cried Billy, almost choking with excitement.
"The same," was the reply in the same rusty voice, "like the sound of a long disused door swinging on its hinges," was the way Billy described it afterward in the article he wrote about the finding of George Desmond.
"But George Desmond was a man of thirty-five!" protested Billy, "when he was lost."
"And I am seventy-five," went on the sad voice in the blackness, "I was captured by the winged men in 1870. I have kept the record of the long years on a notched stick. I never expected to hear the sound of a fellow countryman's voice again."
The poor tired voice broke down, and in the darkness through which they could not see the boys heard the old man weeping.
"Great cats!" groaned Billy to Lathrop, whose hand he held so that they could be near together in the awful blackness, "forty years without seeing a white face—jumping horn-toads, what a fate!"
But the old man's soft weeping stopped presently and in a firmer voice he said:
"My wife and my sons? Can you tell me anything of them?"
As a newspaper man Billy recollected very clearly the space that had been given some five years before to the death, at a ripe old age, of the wife of George Desmond the lost explorer.