Red Rodgers rolled half over, squirmed about, then sat up. For a long time he had felt the floor beneath him vibrate with the throb of powerful motors. His eardrums, beaten upon as they had been by the roar of those motors, now seemed incapable of registering sound.
Not the slightest murmur suggesting life reached his ears. “Not the rustle of a leaf, nor the lap of a tiny wave; not the whisper of a village child asleep,” he told himself. “Can I have gone stone deaf?” Cold perspiration started out upon the tip of his nose.
And then, piercing the silence like a siren’s scream in the night, came a wild, weird, mad, hilarious laugh.
Startled by this sudden shock of sound, he shuddered from head to foot. Then, at once, he felt better.
“At least I am not deaf.”
“That laugh,” he mused a moment later, “it was almost human, but not quite. What could it have been?”
To this question he could form no answer. The wild places, wilderness, forest, lakes, rivers, were sealed books to Red. He had lived his life in a city, lived strenuously and with a purpose.
“Some wild thing,” he murmured. “But where am I?” His brow wrinkled. “I’ve been kidnaped, dragged from my berth in a sleeping car, thrown into a speed boat, carried miles down a river, bundled into this airplane, whirled for hours through the air, and landed here. But where is here? And why am I here at all?”
“Hours,” he whispered slowly. A stray moonbeam lighted a spot on his knee. He placed his wrist there and read the dial of his watch.
“Yes, hours. It’s five after midnight. And to-morrow, hundreds of miles away, I was to have made at least two touchdowns. The crowd would expect at least one sixty-yard dash by the Red Rover.”