“I’ll venture there are a thousand eyes watching it.”
“You’d throw cold water on a fish,” Epworth grumbled. “But just the same we shall make the attempt.”
At this moment a door in one of the large corrugated iron buildings opened, an enormous cylinder was rolled out, twenty men got aboard, and it shot up into the air with incredible rapidity.
“How would the Greyhound get away from an airship like that?”
Joan’s eyes fastened on the disappearing ship with intense fascination.
“I do not see any propellers,” she added thoughtfully.
“It is a rocket plane, I previously described, the latest improvement on the German idea of shooting an airship forward with liquid rockets. However, let’s be moving.”
They ate from the lunch boxes that Epworth had hastily snatched up when they jumped into the air, and with stealthy steps descended the steep incline, hiding frequently behind the large boulders on the hillside. Fortunately the men in the valley, or rather huge crater—for it was patent that it had one time been a volcano and the fires were only now simmering in spots—were busy and did not see them, and they finally got safely behind the large hangar that protected twenty or more of the big airships. Inside of the building the men at work were talking in a strange language but when Epworth peeped around the corner he discovered the coast to the Greyhound seemed clear.
Slipping from behind the hangar they darted across the open space, and gained the protection of another building without being seen. Repeating this maneuver several times they finally came up to several of the American planes. But they had been purposely battered. A wing had been destroyed, an engine had been put out of running, the propeller had been broken, or the fuselage and rudders shot to pieces. The Greyhound had not been in camp long, and seemed to be in working condition. They centered their attention on it.
First Epworth surveyed the field. The crater pit was swarming with men, and weaving in between them were hundreds of women and children. Obviously it was some kind of a colony, and Epworth caught himself wondering what all these people meant by coming this far from civilization to live.