The watchers below saw the Golden Eagle, like a great yellow bird, leave the ground for the upper air in absolute silence. It was such an impressive sight that even the usually voluble natives failed to make any demonstration. At a height of about two hundred feet Frank pulled the control tiller hard over and the Golden Eagle swung round slightly on an almost even keel from the eastward course she was on and headed away to the northwest. The last the group at La Merced saw of her she was a dull bronze speck against the brilliant blue sky, heading steadily for the mountains at a height of about six hundred feet.
It had been arranged between the boys that they should keep going till dusk and then alight in some suitable place and make camp for the night. That they were running great and grave risks they well knew, but neither of them was of the caliber that talks much of such things and so as they forged steadily for the hills with the exhaust throbbing as evenly as a healthy pulse, their conversation was mainly about the course they should adopt to save Billy Barnes if he had actually fallen into Rogero’s hands.
That there would have to be quick action neither boy doubted. Rogero was not the man to stop at half measures, and that Billy would be shot or tortured after a drumhead court-martial; or, perhaps, with even not that attempt at legal formality, was practically certain.
As he sat at the wheel, Frank, from time to time, called Harry to take his place at the duplicate tiller wheel while he with the field glasses swept the earth below for any sign of any camp. The portion of Nicaragua over which the Golden Eagle was soaring is very sparsely inhabited. With the exception of an occasional river bank camp of wandering rubber-cutters, there is little human life.
“What are we making, should you judge, Frank?” asked Harry, when they had been underway about an hour with only the monotonous dull-green jungle, like a leafy carpet beneath them.
“Easily twenty,” replied Frank, “throttled down as we are.”
“Has it occurred to you that we are going to find some difficulty in securing a suitable landing-place?”
“I’ve been thinking of that,” replied the elder boy, “it is of course impossible to make a landing anywhere here, and I can’t for the life of me, see any break in the jungle in the direction we are headed.”
“No,” replied Harry, eagerly, “but have you noticed those hills? As we get nearer to them I can see through the glasses that there seem to be rocky plateaus on their upper ridges that would just about suit us for a settling-down place.”
“What do you propose then?” asked Frank.