Under other circumstances, the situation might have been almost ludicrous. The Indian, who had so manfully charged upon the impregnable fortress of the Wondership was, almost literally, hoisted with his own petard. Two thousand feet above the earth he was clinging with grim tenacity to the slender framework supporting the rudder. To his simple mind the occupants of the air-borne machine must have appeared as some sort of demons from another world, but he had still retained presence of mind enough to hurl a spear at the first one that approached him, although there was nothing very demoniacal about Tom’s fat and roseate face.
The problem now confronting them was to coax this redoubtable savage to relinquish his position on the rudder frames where he was jamming the steering wires. Captain Sprowl undertook this task. Taking Tom’s place he put on as winsome an expression of countenance as his grim features were capable of assuming.
“Now see here, you benighted son of a sea cook,” he premised, “ain’t you got sense enough to come in out of the rain?”
Although of course the Indian had no idea of what the valiant skipper was saying, he regarded him with some interest. Much encouraged, the captain resumed: “There ain’t no manner of sense in your sitting out there, my man. In the fust place, you’ve got a long way to drop if you get chucked off, and in the next you’re jamming our rudder wires. Savvy?”
The Indian, crouching among the wires and braces, merely stared, not without awe, at the redoubtable Yankee, who, for his part, was glad to see that the Amazonian carried no weapons. The spear he had fired at Tom had apparently exhausted his arsenal.
“That’s my bucko,” went on the skipper coaxingly, “you look almost human already. Now come home to tea like a good lad. Do you hear me, you wooden-faced effigy of a cigar store Injun?” he went on in stern tones. “Come in off that jib-boom, or whatever in thunder it’s called, or by the piper that played afore Moses, I’ll yank you in.”
The Indian didn’t utter a word.
“Better hurry up!” warned Jack. “We’re going down and I can’t do a thing with the machine till that rudder wire is free.”
“There, d’ye hear that, you rubber-snouted kanaka?” roared the skipper, growing purple with rage, his fringe of gray whisker actually appearing to bristle as he spoke. “D’ye hear that, you tree-climbing lubber you? We’re going down! down! down! The next stop’ll be the main floor,—the earth,—and you’ll get a bump that’ll jar the grin off your ugly mug.”
Still the Indian crouched stolidly amidst his “squirrel-cage” of wires and braces. The captain was exasperated beyond measure.