“No, no, I tell you, Bruno! Shove her over, uncle, for, without this glass is hoodooed, we're needed right yonder,—and needed mighty bad, too!”
Little need of so much urging, by the way, since Professor Featherwit was but slightly less excited by their double discovery, and even before the glasses were clapped to Waldo's eyes the aerostat swung around to move at full speed towards that precise quarter of the compass.
“What is it you see, then, boy?” demanded Bruno, itching to take the glasses, yet straining his own vision towards that as yet far-distant spot.
“Something like—oh, see how the water is running out,—just like emptying a bathtub through a hole at the bottom! And see what—a man caught in the whirl, true's you're a foot high, uncle!”
“A man? Here? Impossible,—incredible, boy!” fairly exploded the professor, not yet ready to relinquish his cherished belief in a terra incognita.
The air-voyagers were swiftly nearing that point of interest, and now keen-eyed Bruno caught a glimpse of a drifting object which had been drawn within the influence of yonder whirlpool, but which was just as certainly a derelict from the forest.
“Another floating tree-trunk for Waldo!” he cried, with a short laugh, feeling far from unpleased that the intense strain upon his nerves should be thus lessened. “Try it again, lad, and perhaps—”
“Try your great-grandmother's cotton nightcap! Don't you suppose I can tell the difference between a tree and a—”
“Ranting, prancing, cavorting 'sour-us' right out of Webster's Unabridged, eh, laddy-buck?”
“That's all right, if you can only keep on thinking that way, old man; but if yonder isn't a fellow being in a mighty nasty pickle, then I wouldn't even begin to say so! And—you look, uncle Phaeton, please.”