“My handkerchief!” The boy’s eager blue eyes fairly shone. He tossed his blonde hair back to stare at Johnny. “Did some one really find it? And will he rescue me?”
“Some one found it,” Johnny replied slowly. “Curlie Carson, an aviator. Afraid it won’t do you much good, though. He was down in a storm when you passed. Couldn’t follow, of course. Lost all track of this ‘Gray Streak,’ as he calls it. Where is he now? Hundreds of miles away, I suppose.”
Little he knew about that.
“But tell me,” Johnny commanded in an awed whisper. “What sort of outlaws are these that they come into a country without a mark on their plane, burning the gas of honest people without so much as a by-your-leave, and carrying off everyone who comes near them?”
The young boy’s face broadened into a grin. “Again I must, what would you Americans say? ‘Pass the buck.’ I don’t know, at least not much. You have seen them?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Only their plane. They bowled me over as they landed, then apparently picked me up and chucked me in here.”
“They were kind to you in one way,” said D’Arcy. “They gave you your feather robe. Mind sharing it? I’ve been frozen stiff for days.”
Johnny had been too greatly concerned about the troubles he had suddenly fallen heir to to think about comfort. But another’s comfort; that was different. At once his hands were busy untying the thong that bound his eight-foot-square robe into a roll.