Part 3 (1/2)

Barney knew he was thinking of the boy, Timmie, and La Vaune's money he carried into the woods. A square of light, of course, would have been a cabin window.

”Kill your engine if you see a chance to light, and explain later,” he shouted back.

But no square of light appeared, and soon the thought of it was driven from their minds, for, of a sudden, the plane shuddered like a man with a chill. It was the second engine. Bruce threw off the power. Then, with a sput-sput-sput, started it again. Once more came the shudder.

Again he tried with no better results. Half its power was gone; something was seriously wrong. He turned to the other engine. It would not start at all. Here was trouble. They were pa.s.sing over ridge after ridge, and all were roughly timbered. Surely, here was no landing-place. And if the second engine stopped altogether,--Bruce's heart lost a beat at thought of it.

He gave the engine more gas and headed the plane upward. She climbed slowly, sluggishly, like a tired bird, but at length the keener air told him they were a safer distance above the earth.

”Better chance to pick a landing-place from here,” thought Barney.

They had scarcely reached this higher level when the engine stopped. No efforts of the pilot availed to start it. His companions silently watched Bruce's mute struggles. The Major, a perfect sport, sat stoically in his place. Barney, knowing that suggestions were useless, also was silent. So they volplaned slowly downward, every eye strained for a safe landing-place. They knew what a crash would mean at such a place. Loss of life perhaps; a wrecked plane at least, then a struggle through the woods till starvation ended it. They were four hundred miles from the last trace of white man's habitation.

They had come down to three thousand feet when it became evident that only rough ridges lay beneath them. No landing-place here, certainly.

They could only hang on as long as possible in the hope the ridges would give way to level ground. Bruce thanked their luck for the wide-spreading wings which would impede their fall.

A moment later he groaned, for just ahead of them he saw a rocky ridge higher than any they had pa.s.sed over. Here then was the end, he thought.

But the tricky moonlight had deceived him. They cleared those rocks by a hundred feet and just beyond Bruce gasped and looked again.

”A miracle!” murmured Barney.

”Or a mirage,” whispered Bruce.

Before them lay a square of level land, green,--in the moonlight. All about the square the land was black with trees, but there was a landing place. It was as if their trip had been long planned, their coming antic.i.p.ated, and that a level field was cleared for them.

It was only a matter of moments till they were b.u.mping along over the ground. Soon they were standing free from their harnesses and silently shaking hands.

Barney was the first to speak.

”Say, do you know,” he said, ”we're in somebody's wheat-field!”

”Impossible!” exclaimed the Major.

”See for yourself,” The boy held before their astonished eyes a handful of almost ripened heads of wheat.

”Then what's happened?” demanded the Major. ”Have you gone due south by west instead of north by west?”

”Unless my compa.s.s lied, and it has never done so before, we have gone north by west since we started, and we are--or ought to be at this moment--four hundred miles from what the white man calls civilization.”

”Well,” said the Major, ”since we are here, wherever that is, I suggest that we unpack our blankets and get out of the man's wheat-field, whoever he may be. The mystery will keep until morning.”

This they proceeded to do.

A clump of stubby, heavy-stemmed spruce trees offered them shelter from the chill night wind, and there, rolled in blankets, they prepared to sleep.

But Bruce could not sleep. Driving a plane through clouds, mist and suns.h.i.+ne for hours had made every nerve alert. And the strain of that last sagging slide through the air was not to be relieved instantly. So he lay there in his blankets, a tumult of ideas in his mind. This wheat-field now? Had he really been misdirected by the compa.s.s on the plane? To prove that he had not, he drew from his pocket a small compa.s.s, and placing it in a spot of moonlight, took the relative direction of the last ridge over which they had pa.s.sed and the plane in the wheat-field.

He was right; the compa.s.s had been true. They were four hundred miles northwest of the last mile of track laid on the Hudson Bay Railroad, deep in a wilderness, over which they had traveled for hours without sighting a single sign of white man's habitation. Yet, here they were at the edge of a wheat-field.

What was the answer? Had some Indian tribe taken to farming? With the forests alive with game, the streams with fish, this seemed impossible.

Of a sudden, the boy started. It was, of course--

The sudden snapping of a twig in the underbrush brought his mind back with a jerk to their present plight. He wished they had brought the rifles from the plane. Some animal was lurking there in the shadows.