“We have threshed that out, and the camp will, as one man, force him to treat you kindly, and as an equal. In fact, they say that the Americans won the day for them against these Lunar enemies, and that hereafter they cannot afford to trust everything to the general. He will have to divide authority with you, and agree to your terms.”
“Very well. We will come. Billy, remain here and put things in shape to keep. We will not go off and leave ourselves without supplies in case we have to come back. Later we will return and all of us will go back to the Aerolite. I also think that we must band together to protect ourselves from all kinds of Lunar enemies.”
Accompanied by Joan, Epworth entered his glider and flew over to the Aerolite. They were greeted as conquering heroes, and Epworth was immediately put in charge of the camp. First, he established a strong military organization with Michael as the commanding officer, and arranged to materialize all the stores of the Aerolite into defense weapons. When this work was completed he created a council of five, and had the colonists elect the members. This council was to be the governing power, and he bound the pirates by firm obligations to force Toplinsky to obey the orders of this council.
With this accomplished he and Joan returned, well satisfied, to their cave, leaving the entire membership of the colony housed in the Aerolite so that if any danger arose they could fly out of it.
“Hey, there, Billy!” Epworth shouted as he landed lightly in front of the cave. “Snap out of it. We’re going to go to the Aerolite. From this on, I think it will be perfectly safe for us.”
There was no answer, and with a frown on his face the young man divested himself of his glider, and entered the cave.
Billy was not there, and his glider and all their supplies were missing.
“W-w-what do you suppose happened to him?” Joan inquired nervously, looking over Epworth’s shoulder. “We were not gone over two hours, and yet all of our supplies are gone—things that it took us ten days to cart from the Aerolite. Looks as if ghosts had been here.”
“Billy could not have moved them in this time,” Epworth reasoned. “Something has happened to him.”
With the carefulness of a detective he began to search the cave for evidence that would lead to the direction in which Billy had gone. Every article they had left in the way of supplies was gone. Even the water jars were missing, and the only evidence of the presence of enemies consisted of numerous small lines in the sand of the floor. These lines looked like finger marks. Billy’s foot prints, close to the point where they had last seen his glider, were plainly evidenced, but Epworth could not ascertain the direction he had gone when he left. In fact, reasoning by his foot tracks, he went up into the air, and he could not have gone far in this direction because the top of the cave would have stopped him.