“Not a thing. This is a serious business, Old Man, we’ve got to keep our heads to get out of it.”

“Ha-ha haaahahhhaaa,” shouted Jim, then he made a slight gesture which seemed to include the entire world. “Ha-ha—”

“Ha—” Bob started to mimic him, then his eyes swept swiftly over the place. He turned himself about to look more closely, then, he too opened his mouth and roared with genuine amusement. “Ha-ha-ha-ha.” It was a soul-satisfying bellow which shook him from head to foot for several minutes, then he pulled himself together. “We don’t want to make any mistake.” With that he ran to the nearest green pile and began to pull on it. After a moment Austin joined him, and although they continued to chuckle as they worked, they had control of themselves.

“Behold the Helicopter,” Jim cried as the plane began to stand out from the covering of foliage the bandits had put on it.

“No wonder you laughed,” grinned Bob.

“When I first saw it I thought I had gone crazy, then I was sure and my giggling apparatus went wide open. Gee, to think, after all that traveling—millions of miles it seemed—then to come right back to the place we started from. Gosh all Friday, it’s like finding an everlasting cream puff. Whew—aint it a grand and glorious feeling!”

“I’ll say! If we had built our signal fire over there on the top of the ruin and Bradshaw had found us—the plane almost under our noses, howling catnip but he would have had a laugh on us. It was a close shave all right.”

“Suppose I go over the machine and you take a look at the other one. Shall we leave it here, or one of us fly it?” Jim asked.

“Don’t know that I’m so crazy about going in separate planes, Buddy, but they would surely think us nuts to leave one.”

“That’s what I was thinking. I’ll pilot one and you take the other. We can mark this section on the chart and have a doctor or someone sent back to get Mills. He’ll be all right for a few hours and it ought not to be hard to locate him, they can follow his trail of shells. He’ll probably spill the whole lot as he goes.”

“No sense in either of us trying to get him to civilization in one of the planes. If we leave him here, he might come out, just get enough sense to go up in it, then come down in a smash or run into some other machine.”

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