“All right, Old Timer, I’m with you to any reasonable extent, but you remember how said Child got his nose pulled. Careful where you put yours,” Jim remarked.

“I’ll keep him in mind,” Bob chuckled.

“Have a look at this,” Jim’s hand waved to designate the clearing. “Suppose it could be the top of some temple that’s been buried by earthquakes?”

“Might,” Bob agreed thoughtfully and examined the place more closely, but they kept close to the machine. “Reckon we’d better watch closely; that chap may come back with some more angels.”

“He might. Lucky we took Bradshaw’s helicopter instead of one of the other machines.”

“Yes, even at that I’d rather have the ‘Lark’.”

“Why not wait until she is fixed up then come back in her?” Jim suggested. There was something awe-inspiring about the whole scene and he felt that they would be safer with their own plane, which had numerous extra instruments, greater speed, and was infinitely more easy to pilot than the Canadian Mounty’s machine.

“Aw Buddy, we want to get home sometime! I say, we started out, expecting to be gone not more than a couple of weeks and look how long we’ve been hanging around down here. I’d give a tooth right now to fork a real bronc and have a grand gallop across the ranches.”

“Same here,” Jim nodded with a little sigh.

“But since we are here I’d like to see more of what grows in this climate. We have to wait for the ‘Lark,’ the message tube is safe in the hands of Don Haurea instead of in your pocket—”

“Or Arthur Gordon’s,” supplemented Jim.

“Wow. I say, I bet a jack-straw against the White House that he was congratulating himself that we didn’t take it back from him when he was laid out so nicely—”

“I’d give a pair of colts to have seen his face when he opened the empty one. Silver pants, but that was a streak of luck—”

“I’ll say it was. That was a mistake as was a mistake,” Bob chuckled. “Gee, when I saw you let him take it away from you without so much as a yelp I might have known it was flukey. We couldn’t put up a fight, all tied around like a pair of hot dogs, but you didn’t even squirm. And you never knew that you’d sent it by the mail pilot from La Paz—”

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