CHAPTER X.--CHASING THE MILKY WAY.

While the boys were exchanging experiences with Ernest Whipple, talking over Boy Scout matters and arranging for a sleeping place for the stranger, Ned was busy with his aeroplane. It had not suffered in the least from the heat and wind, and there was plenty of gasoline on hand for a journey which he was thinking of taking.

"Where are we goin' to-night?" Jimmie asked, finally, strolling over to the spot where the great bird lay.

"As the wind is right," Ned laughed, "I thought I'd take a sail over the divide and see what the alleged foresters are up to."

"All right," the boy said, "just wait until I get a big blanket to wrap up in and I'll go with you."

Ned smiled at the determination of the lad to keep close to his side. He knew that Jimmie dreaded the very idea of leaving the solid earth that night, still he found him willing to make the ascent merely for the sake of being in his company.

"All right, kid," he said. "You may go if you want to, but it may be morning before we get back to camp."

"You can't remain in the air all that time," Jimmie said.

"I am fully aware of that," Ned replied, "but I can drop down over on the other side and rest and tinker with the machine--if she doesn't work just right."

"You haven't got gasoline enough," urged Jimmie, who would have argued Ned out of the notion of the night flight if possible, but who was determined to go with him if he went.

"The first thing I do," Ned replied, "will be to fly over the Great Northern right of way and fill up with gasoline. Besides filling the tanks, I shall carry a lot away in an aluminum keg I have provided for that purpose."

"Well," Jimmie said, with a tired sigh, "I should think you'd been through enough to-day and to-night, without goin' off in the dark, but I'm goin' if you do."

After talking with the others regarding his intentions, and warning them to keep a sharp lookout during his absence, Ned assisted Jimmie to his seat and the two were away. There was scant room for a rise between the spot where the machine lay and the foot of the range, but Ned had little difficulty in getting into the sky and swinging along in the breeze.

It was now after ten o'clock, and the moon was high in the heavens. To the east the dark passes of the mountains showed green and misty in the moonlight. To the west the burned spaces looked dark and forbidding, with smoke half hiding the ruin that had been wrought. Jimmie clung to the machine and insisted that Ned was chasing the Milky Way when he lifted the aeroplane up the level of the divide.

Before crossing the divide, however, Ned flew to the Great Northern right of way and filled his tanks with gasoline, also filling the extra keg. The machine, which was an improved Wright, was then turned to the north-east. So perfect have aeroplanes now become that even inexperienced drivers may sometimes venture into the air with them with impunity, still it is well known that it is more the man than the machine that decides whether there shall be a tumble or a successful flight.

The aeroplane is a wonderful invention, yet the point which really makes it so serviceable is a very simple one. For years inventors studied ways of making a heavier-than-air machine sail through the sky like a bird. Then the gasoline engine came, and all the rest seemed easy.

But no one could keep control of the aeroplane. It moved about according to its own whims, and tipped drivers out at its own sweet will. Then the Wrights thought of lifting and lowering the planes to represent the wings and feathers of a bird. The secret had been found and required only experience and practice. Here was a machine light enough to fly, yet strong enough to carry with safety its powerful engine and two or more passengers, if there is room provided for them.

It is so stout that a man may walk over it while it lies on the ground, and yet so delicate in control when in the air that a slight pull on a lever will dip one wing, lift the other, and at the same time turn a vertical tail-rudder about to give the necessary balancing pull with almost the instinctive adaptability of a bird's wings and feathers.

And this wonderful machine, while speeding through the air with the velocity of an express train, can be halted almost instantly and whirled about on its tail. It will be seen that it is the man at the levers who makes or breaks a journey in the air. One man may do almost anything with a machine, while another may send himself to eternity with the same one. It was Ned's good fortune that he was naturally ingenious and quick to make his hands follow the impulses of his brain.

When a person is thundering through the air, a thousand feet above the earth, he must remain perfectly calm, even with the engine thundering behind his ears, tears running in streams down his face, and the wind fluttering his clothes into rags and ravelings, as he wishes he was back on land.

Besides, there are no level plains in the air, as there are on earth. Every bird-man knows that he is liable to come up against a fierce current or tumble into a hole in the atmosphere at any moment. While traveling in water one can see what is ahead and on both sides, but this is not so in the air. The currents, swirls, eddies, holes, do not show at all.

When Ned left the cache where the gasoline and provisions had been hidden away, he put on half speed, swinging steadily skyward on a broad spiral. His purpose was to pass over the summit and have a look at the forests on the east side.

The passenger's seat in the Wright machine is in the middle. The engine is at his right and the driver at his left, so that the balance is the same whether an extra person is carried or not. Jimmie was glad of this, for it placed him close to Ned. In that half light, with the earth far below, with the pounding of the engine and the whistling of the wind, the boy felt the need of close human companionship.

He sat in a wooden seat with his back against the rest, holding to one of the uprights with both hands, and resting his tingling feet on a cross-bar. A guy-wire passed across in front, close to his chest, so he was now fastened in.

He wanted to talk with Ned, to hear the sound of his voice, but the clamor of the engine prevented that, so he just sat still and looked down on the flying forest below. It seemed to him, at least, that the forest was moving, while he was standing still in the starlight.

Up the aeroplane went, and still higher up. Jimmie saw the great divide below, and saw little red specks in the forests of the eastern slope which denoted forest fires not yet grown to maturity. After passing the summit Ned saw the campfire of the men Ernest had spoken of. He passed them, swung around a circle lower down, selected a spot where he thought he could land with safety, and dropped down.

Jimmie declared afterwards that he felt as if he had been thrown out of the window of a twenty-story building--and the highest window at that. When the aeroplane came into the shadows of the high trees where the landing was being made he knew that a wind was blowing at the surface and feared that the machine would be carried along on the ground and dumped over into a canyon.

The machine sank gracefully into a glade rather high up on the slope, and the boys alighted to stretch their legs. Ned's first move was to see if there was plenty of room for him to get out. What he found was an incline to the east, an incline ending at a great canyon, into which he would have been hurled had the aeroplane run fifty feet farther on the ground.

"I think I can make it," he said, "but it is risky. It wouldn't be nice to take a header a thousand feet down."

After the inspection of the locality Ned extinguished all the lights and sat down to map out his plans for the remainder of the night. There were the usual noises of the forest, as found at night, but no human sounds intruded.

Ned knew that the clamor of the engine must have been heard by the men in the camp he had flown over, and he had no doubt that the outlaws would make a quick excursion to his landing place, if they could determine where it was. So he put out the lights and listened for some indication of the approach of the others.

"They won't find us in a thousand years," Jimmie volunteered, as the two sat close together under a great tree.

"I hope not," Ned replied, "for then we shall have a better chance to find them."

"What do you want to find 'em for?" questioned the boy. "You can't pinch 'em, 'cause you haven't got the proof, an' you couldn't if you had the proof, 'cause there ain't enough of us. They'd eat us up like spinach."

"You are right as far as you have gone," Ned replied, "but you have not gone far enough. What I want now is to find out what they are doing here. And, also, I want to find out about that fellow from San Francisco. If the description is any good, he was in the city when I left it, and I don't see how he ever got here so soon. I came part way on an aeroplane, but it seems that he traveled farther and beat me out."

"What's he got to do with it?" asked Jimmie. "What did you find out in the city? You won't have no luck if you don't tell me all about it."

So, while they waited, Ned told him "all about it," while the boy sat in the dusk with his eyes and mouth both opened wide at the mystery of the thing.

"I don't believe Albert Lemon ever got out here so soon," the lad said, when the story was told. "He couldn't."

"Then who is the man from San Francisco?" asked Ned.

"It can't be the dead man?" questioned Jimmie.

"You saw him buried," Ned answered.

"Then I give it up!" Jimmie said.

The two sat there in silence a long time, then Jimmie gave Ned's arm a pull and pointed to a flickering light in the forest just above the glade where the aeroplane rested.

"They think you've landed somewhere here," the boy said, "an' have set fire to the woods."

"I think you have guessed it," Ned said. "However, the blaze won't run very fast up there, for the undergrowth is scanty, so we've got plenty of time to get out of the way."

Jimmie scrambled up the slope, clinging to rocks and roots with both fingers and feet, and ran toward the blaze. Ned watched the little fellow dashing along with no little anxiety, for the outlaws might be there in the thickets, watching for some attempt to be made to lift the aeroplane.

He saw Jimmie recklessly climb to the top of a great rock which jutted out from the side of the mountain and saw his figure outlined against the growing blaze on the slope above. Then the fire died down, as if for want of material, and the top of the rock could no longer be seen.

Ned listened, but Jimmie did not return. The effort to create a general conflagration on the mountain side had evidently failed, for there was little to burn save the green boles of trees, that section having been swept by fire a year before.

Not daring to leave the aeroplane for even an instant, Ned awaited the return of the boy with premonitions of trouble in his mind. Presently he heard a shot, then a cry, and after that a brutal laugh. The outlaws were nearer than he thought.

There was only one thing for Ned to do, and that was to get the aeroplane into the sky immediately, and so once more place it beyond the reach of the outlaws. There was nothing he could do to aid Jimmie, he reflected, sadly, by remaining there.

It was no task at all to start the rollers down the incline, but the canyon threatened if he did not get it off the ground in quick time. He knocked the stones out from under the wheels and sprang into his seat. The machine, gaining momentum, moved on sedately. It had acquired a fair rate of speed when he came within a few feet of the canyon.

Then, after letting it get all the headway possible in that confined space without coming too close to the canyon, Ned pulled the lever which tilted the front rudder planes. Trifling as the deflection was the man-made bird felt its influence and rose from the slope as if endowed with life.

It reached the edge of the descent some distance in the air, and the boy was congratulating himself on the success of his unaided rise when the big machine began to sag as if dropping to the ground, five hundred feet below.

The west wall of the canyon ran straight down, and it seemed to Ned that he was following it, like an iron spike thrown off the ledge. He knew very well what had occurred. He had fallen into one of the down-tipping currents so frequent in mountain districts.

The air, he knew, was sliding down the precipice just as water tumbles over a dam. If it turned, as it might, when it struck the lower strata of air, he might secure control of his machine and manage to lift it out of the canyon. If it did not, he would doubtless fall to the rocky floor of the canyon, and lie there until some chance hunter or forester came upon a heap of bleaching bones and the wreck of an aeroplane.

But even at that swift pace downward, and at that exciting moment, Ned found himself puzzling over the strange sight he saw in a break in the wall of the canyon. It was a large opening he looked into, and strange figures were gathered about a cooking fire.