"What do you say to that plan, Sikaso?" asked Frank, who already placed a high value on the old warrior's judgment.
"That it is good, my white brother. Sikaso will stay with the four-eyed one and the ruddy-haired one and we will see that no harm comes to the camp of the young white warriors."
"It is well," replied Frank, who was falling into a trick of addressing the stately Krooman in the same grandiloquent fashion as the latter was in the habit of using, "I place my trust in you."
"Hum," snorted Billy, "four-eyes and red-top that's a nice combination for you! I'd like to do something to show that old chap that we can do just as much as anyone else when it comes to a show-down."
This remark, however, was made sotto voce to Lathrop, as Billy really stood in great awe of the six foot-two of ebony flesh and muscle that was Sikaso.
But Stubbs was delighted at his selection to accompany the boys in their aerial dash for the ivory cache. He spent half the night by lantern light pottering about the great craft and stocking her up with provisions and equipment for the journey. By the time he had finished it was almost midnight and he turned in to join the boys in the land of dreams where Frank and Harry, and doubtless the others, too, were already busy shooting down Diegos and hippopotami and flitting through the air above the great African forest and performing all sorts of wonderful feats.
At dawn everybody was up and about and after farewells had been said the Chester boys and their sturdy old companion clambered into the chassis of their craft. Frank had already laid out his course, which lay about two points west of north. The boy calculated that this direction would bring them within a few miles at any rate of the cache. To find it they would have to trust to persistence and a modicum of luck.
Old Sikaso, who had, of course, never seen anything even remotely resembling an aeroplane, stood apart from the excited group clustered about the big craft and gazed at it with astonishment, not unmixed with awe. The other Kroomen—the packers and camp-workers, however, gathered close about the machine and the boys had a lot of trouble keeping their busy fingers from unscrewing nuts and loosening turnbuckles.
"Anything more like a pack of monkeys on a picnic I never saw," exclaimed Billy as for the twentieth time he chased a long, skinny native away from the propellers, where he would have assuredly been decapitated if he had remained till the engine was started.
A few turns with the clutch thrown out showed the engine was running as true as on the day the Golden Eagle made her trial trip. The muffler was cut out and the effect of the wide-open exhaust on the Kroomen was magical. Within a second from the time that Harry threw in the switch and the gatling gun uproar of the exhaust made itself manifest, not a solitary one was to be seen. From the greenery of the jungle that rimmed the clearing, however, their frightened faces could be seen peering, like some strange sort of fruit among the tropical growth. Only old Sikaso stood his ground.