“It came out of that round black tube buried in earth at the far side of the valley; or, perhaps, it was one of the mysterious flying machines that the newspapers talked about—like the one that captured the Greyhound. You can readily see that this is the lair of the sky bandits. There is the Greyhound.”
Epworth drew out his powerful field glasses. He never failed to carry them with him. In fact, he had become so accustomed to searching the earth for miles around as he flew over it that it had become as much of a habit to carry binoculars as it was to wear his nose. His observations corroborated Joan’s statement concerning the Greyhound. In addition to that plane he saw a number of other machines that belonged to the Atlantic-Pacific Airlines, Inc., and bags of saltpeter piled indiscriminately around a large warehouse made of corrugated iron.
But there were no indications of idleness in the camp. Even the women and children were doing some kind of work, and the men—more than a thousand of them—were rushing pell mell hither and yon, gathering up large quantities of stuff, pushing it into containers, and piling the containers systematically into cylinders at least two thousand feet long.
“No, it was not an airship. It was one of those long aluminum cylinders that are being loaded by the men at work. It was shot up into the air by some kind of machinery. But why do they do it, and where is the machinery?”
“In that hole in the ground,” Joan explained, as she glanced through the binoculars. “There seems to be a round pit over there.”
“Well, we are going down there and find out what it all means. Very likely the crews of all the airships stolen are down there. I am quite sure that Billy Sand is there.”
“Going to walk right in, turn right around, and walk right out with all the airships and the rescued crews?”
Her tone was quite sarcastic.
“I hardly think that we will work that fast but if we are not able to sneak into that place and get the Greyhound there is very little hope of ever returning to dear old Uncle Sam.”
“There are forty of the new-style airships,” she pointed out, “and it would be easy for them to overtake the Greyhound.”