“Hey, stop that!” yelled the cowboy leader, but at the same moment he broke off with a yell of terror.
“Look out for the dynamite bomb!” yelled Harry, as he dropped the flaming blue flare over the side of the aeroplane, fairly on top of the gang of cowboys.
“Ride for your lives, boys!” shouted the leader of the cowboys, as the flaming light dropped, “she’s goin’ ter bust.”
They didn’t need any urging, but fled with wild cries.
By the time the cattlemen realized they had been tricked, the auto was away on the prairie, speeding on toward the west in a cloud of dust, while the aeroplane was far out of range.
CHAPTER XIII.
INDIANS!
“Ah, now we are beginning to get into my own country again; this begins ter look like home,” exclaimed Bart Witherbee, one day as the adventurers made camp in a canyon in one of the southernmost spurs of the Rockies in the state of New Mexico. The boys had made the detour to the south to avoid crossing the range itself, which would have been a difficult, if not an impossible, task in an aeroplane.
Still they had not sighted the rival racing air-craft, but they knew that the others could not be far ahead now, as at a small settlement they stopped at the day before they learned that the Slade party had called at the blacksmith shop there to repair a truss brace that had snapped. As the facilities of the smithy were rather clumsy for the fine work that has to be done on the aeroplane, the Slade machine was delayed several hours. So far as their judgment went, the boys decided that the other party could not be much more than fifty miles ahead of them.
As for the dirigible, they had heard that the expansion of its gas bag, caused by the sun, had compelled it to remain all one day in a small town in the Texas Panhandle, and that while it was journeying across the arid country it could travel only short distances. The boys, therefore, felt much cheered as at sundown they alighted by the side of a brawling mountain stream and made camp. Bart Witherbee at once got out his improvised fishing tackle and started up the stream in search of trout, which he declared would abound in such waters.
“We’ll have a change from canned beef, canned soup and canned vegetables to-night, boys,” he declared, “if I haven’t lost the knack of it.”