We see this plan was a mistake. We couldn’t ever git away from them at this gait, and I couldn’t hold on forever. So Tom took a think, and struck another idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box revolver, and then sail away while the others stopped to fight over the carcass. So he stopped the balloon still, and done it, and then we sailed off while the fuss was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off, and they helped me aboard; but by the time we was out of reach again, that gang was on hand once more. And when they see we was really gone and they couldn’t get us, they sat down on their hams and looked up at us so kind of disappointed that it was as much as a person could do not to see their side of the matter.
CHAPTER VI.
IT’S A CARAVAN
I was so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so I made straight for my locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a body couldn’t get back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom give the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft.
We had to go up a mile before we struck comfortable weather where it was breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all straight again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps up and says:
“I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We’re in the Great Sahara, as sure as guns!”
He was so excited he couldn’t hold still; but I wasn’t. I says:
“Well, then, where’s the Great Sahara? In England or in Scotland?”
“’Tain’t in either; it’s in Africa.”
Jim’s eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of interest, because that was where his originals come from; but I didn’t more than half believe it. I couldn’t, you know; it seemed too awful far away for us to have traveled.
But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it, and said the lions and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could ’a’ found out, before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres, if he had thought of one thing; and when we asked him what, he said: