A LOOK AT THE BOWL.
The interruption which came at the restaurant during the meal Ben and
Carl were having with Mr. Havens and the two officers, was, to the boys
at least, a most astonishing one.
When Sloan entered the restaurant, his head wrapped in a great bandage,
the boys, of course, recognized him as the man who had played the part
of a Chinaman so cleverly. After the explanations made by the two
officers, Sloan would have been recognized in any event, but the boys
would have known him if they had had no information on the subject.
His resemblance to a Chinaman was, indeed, striking. Indeed, it was
claimed by many who knew and disliked him that he really was a Chinaman.
As he entered the restaurant Sloan beckoned to Gilmore, and the two
conferred together a short time at a separate table.
The boys saw that Gilmore was very much interested in the revelations
being made by Sloan, and they also saw that the detective was very weak.
By the time the conference was ended the meal had been completed, and
Gilmore returned to his friends while Sloan hastened away in the care of
a deputy sheriff who had been summoned to the restaurant.
“This visit appears to make a change of plan necessary,” Gilmore said,
as the five walked away from the restaurant. “We have some talking to
do, so we may as well go to my office, where we can talk without danger
of being overheard.”
All were, of course, very anxious to know the result of the interview
between the chief ranger and the detective, but they asked no questions,
and Gilmore said nothing until they were seated in the private office of
a suite of rooms set aside for the sheriff.
“As you all saw,” Gilmore began, “Sloan is all in. He was attacked by a
number of smugglers not very long ago and barely escaped with his life.”
“Served him right!” muttered Ben. “He’s the guy that spilled our
gasoline! I wish they’d beaten him up more.”
“Now,” continued Gilmore, “the story told by you boys concerning the
smugglers’ headquarters was repeated to me by Sloan with only a few
variations. He has located the place where the Chinks are hidden until
they can be safely run into the cities, and has spotted several of the
leaders, including the captain of one of the schooners which frequently
appears off the south beacon.”
“We came pretty near doing all that!” Carl laughed.
“Now, what he wants us to do,” Gilmore continued, “is to station a force
of men around a summit from which all that goes on below may be watched.
He says that if we reach the place between midnight and morning we will
see Chinks rowed ashore from the schooner and passed into the caves the
boys penetrated.”
“That listens good to me!” said the sheriff. “I’ve long been aching to
get my hands on those smugglers!”
“He says, too,” continued Gilmore, “that large quantities of opium are
stored in the caves. He wants me to take a force large enough to
surround the whole district and do the job at one blow.”
“Do you think that a good idea?” asked the sheriff.
“I do not!” was Gilmore’s reply. “In the first place, we can’t get men
in there to-night. In the next place, if we could, we couldn’t station
them without alarming the outlaws.”
“That’s just my idea,” the sheriff said.
“Perhaps,” Mr. Havens suggested, “we might reach that point in the
airships. It isn’t a very long journey, according to what Ben says.”
“That’s just what I was about to suggest,” Gilmore explained. “How many
people will the two ships you have here carry?”
“They will carry six, on a pinch,” was the reply. “The small persons
would, of course, have to travel on the _Bertha_.”
Havens stepped to the window and looked out.
“We were thinking of looking up Jimmie and Kit,” he said, “but it’s
getting dark now, and we never could find them in this tangle of hills
unless they were up in the air with lights burning.”
“I’ll tell you what we can do,” Ben observed. “The sheriff and the
ranger can go in the _Ann_ with you, Mr. Havens, and Carl and I can
switch around over the place where we had our camp and see if there are
any signs of the boys.”
“That will do nicely,” Mr. Havens replied.
“Now, see here,” the sheriff interrupted. “There are only two of you
boys, both light weights, and the machine, you say, will carry three. Is
that right? Why not take Stroup along with us?”
“Sure!” Ben exclaimed. “I’d like to have that fellow go with us. I’ve
heard what he did to three people here to-day, and I think he’d prove a
pretty good friend in a hot scrap!”
“I’ll send out for him,” the sheriff promised, “and in the meantime,
we’ll all keep pretty close in the office.”
“That’s a good idea,” suggested Gilmore. “There’s no knowing how many
friends the smugglers have in this town. I would suggest, however,” he
went on, “that some one go out and look over the two machines.”
“The machines are all right,” the sheriff assured the others. “There are
six deputies out there now in charge of Stroup, and he sent in a report
not long ago. The crowd has been hustled off the field, and everything
out there is as quiet as a prohibition convention.”
“What time ought we to start?” asked Ben, like all boys, eager to be
away. “I’m actually getting anxious to be off.”
“We can make the distance in half an hour, if we are obliged to,”
replied Havens, “unless I’m greatly mistaken in the location of the
promontory. So we ought not to leave here until about midnight.”
“It will be dark as a stack of black cats!” exclaimed Carl looking out
of the window at the sky.
“There’s plenty of room above the clouds!” smiled Havens.
“Never thought of that!” exclaimed Ben. “We were above the clouds in
Mexico once, but that seems a long time ago now.”
“And there will be a moon about midnight, too,” Gilmore explained, “so
we can see everything above the clouds quite distinctly.”
“Huh!” grinned Carl, “we can’t look through the clouds at the schooner
and the Chinks, can we?”
“Hardly!” laughed Gilmore. “Still, the cloudy night will help us in this
way—we can travel above the clouds and not be observed from below. That
will help some.”
“And I presume that we can crawl down the incline and get a glimpse of
what’s going on below,” the sheriff suggested. “At least, I’m willing to
try. The time to make the arrests is right now.”
“Perhaps we ought to start a short time before the _Ann_ leaves the
place,” Ben suggested, “because we’ll have quite a few miles farther to
travel if we circle over to look after Jimmie and Kit.”
“That’s very true,” Havens replied. “Are you sure that you know where
the summit which has been mentioned is?” he added.
“If it’s the summit directly east of the south headland where we saw the
light, I know exactly where it is,” answered Ben. “There are two peaks
there, and the one to the east and north is a trifle higher than the one
referred to now.”
“That’s exactly correct,” announced Gilmore. “The two peaks separate a
great chasm in the range which is known as Two Sisters canyon.”
Ben sprang to his feet and drew a bit of white paper from a pocket.
“Look here!” he shouted, “This paper was taken from the monkey-faced man
who chased Jimmie up New York bay! The fellow smashed his machine and
lay with a broken arm in Robinson’s barn, away back east, until Kit
found a doctor to fix him up. This paper, enclosed in an envelope, fell
from his pocket when his coat was removed.”
“Read it!” exclaimed Gilmore excitedly.
“It isn’t much to read,” Ben explained. “All it says is: ‘In Two Sisters
Canyon’.”
“There you are!” cried Carl, hopping about in his enthusiasm. “That
paper makes a date, not for the meeting with the outlaws but for the
meeting of the men who traveled from New York to warn them of their
danger, and get them out of the country.”
“That’s just the idea!” the sheriff said with a laugh. “Are all your New
York boys like these?” he added with a smile turning to Havens.
“I’m afraid not,” was the laughing reply. “The wits of these boys were
sharpened in the streets of the East Side.”
Shortly after midnight Ben and Carl, accompanied by Stroup, departed in
the _Bertha_ for the valley where the _Louise_ had been left. The clouds
were thinning a little, and the darkness was not so intense as it had
been earlier in the evening. Stroup knew every inch of the way, and so
the machine made good progress until it came over the little green bowl
which had been the scene of so many adventures.
“There’s no light there!” Ben said, with a sigh, as they passed the lip
of the pit. “I don’t believe there’s any one here.”
“There’s just a little flicker of light,” Stroup declared. “And it looks
to me like the embers of a camp-fire.”
“We didn’t have any fire!” Ben explained.
“Then Jimmie and Kit must have returned,” Carl put in. “They may be
there yet. Of course we’re going down to see?”
“That’s what we came here for,” Stroup answered. “Only be careful, boy,
how you bring her down!”
Ben smiled at the big deputy’s timidity, and brought the machine to
within a few feet of the embers which had been left by the fire built to
cook the outlaws’ steak.
As Kit and Jimmie had left the camp two or three hours previous in the
machine they had repaired, of course no one was seen about the place.
Ben and Carl ran eagerly over the surface of the green bowl with their
flashlights, but no trace of their chums could be found. Even the
shelter tents had been taken away by the boys.
Discouraged at last, the boys returned to the machine, and the three
mounted upward through the clouds, now thinning fast. The moon was
rising, too, laying a silver floor over the upper surface of the moving
clouds.
“Now there’s the peak!” Ben said, pointing. “And there’s an aeroplane on
it, too! And also a scrap!”