Under other circumstances, the situation might have been almost ludicrous. The Indian, who had so manfully charged upon the impregnable fortress of the Wondership was, almost literally, hoisted with his own petard. Two thousand feet above the earth he was clinging with grim tenacity to the slender framework supporting the rudder. To his simple mind the occupants of the air-borne machine must have appeared as some sort of demons from another world, but he had still retained presence of mind enough to hurl a spear at the first one that approached him, although there was nothing very demoniacal about Tom’s fat and roseate face.

The problem now confronting them was to coax this redoubtable savage to relinquish his position on the rudder frames where he was jamming the steering wires. Captain Sprowl undertook this task. Taking Tom’s place he put on as winsome an expression of countenance as his grim features were capable of assuming.

“Now see here, you benighted son of a sea cook,” he premised, “ain’t you got sense enough to come in out of the rain?”

Although of course the Indian had no idea of what the valiant skipper was saying, he regarded him with some interest. Much encouraged, the captain resumed: “There ain’t no manner of sense in your sitting out there, my man. In the fust place, you’ve got a long way to drop if you get chucked off, and in the next you’re jamming our rudder wires. Savvy?”

The Indian, crouching among the wires and braces, merely stared, not without awe, at the redoubtable Yankee, who, for his part, was glad to see that the Amazonian carried no weapons. The spear he had fired at Tom had apparently exhausted his arsenal.

“That’s my bucko,” went on the skipper coaxingly, “you look almost human already. Now come home to tea like a good lad. Do you hear me, you wooden-faced effigy of a cigar store Injun?” he went on in stern tones. “Come in off that jib-boom, or whatever in thunder it’s called, or by the piper that played afore Moses, I’ll yank you in.”

The Indian didn’t utter a word.

“Better hurry up!” warned Jack. “We’re going down and I can’t do a thing with the machine till that rudder wire is free.”

“There, d’ye hear that, you rubber-snouted kanaka?” roared the skipper, growing purple with rage, his fringe of gray whisker actually appearing to bristle as he spoke. “D’ye hear that, you tree-climbing lubber you? We’re going down! down! down! The next stop’ll be the main floor,—the earth,—and you’ll get a bump that’ll jar the grin off your ugly mug.”

Still the Indian crouched stolidly amidst his “squirrel-cage” of wires and braces. The captain was exasperated beyond measure.

“You putty mugged Yahoo!” he bawled out in a quarter-deck voice. “For the third and last time of askin’:—air you a-comin’ aboard? Speak now or remain forever silent.”

Not a word uttered the quiet, copper-colored figure amid the stern rigging.

“Ve-ry well, then,” growled the captain, and a muscular arm shot out and grabbed the astonished Indian by the scruff of the neck, “I’ll have to get you, my lad.”

With a strength which none of them had guessed the peppery little New Englander possessed, the captain fairly hove the uninvited passenger into the machine. The Indian offered no resistance. He appeared to think that he was irrevocably doomed to death, and that nothing he could do would save him from his fate.

When the captain had hauled him on board, he lay flat on his face in the bottom of the tonneau and uttered not a word.

“Get up thar, and act like a Christian,” exclaimed the captain angrily. “We ain’t goin’ to hurt you, you benighted monkey.”

“I’ll go down,” said Jack presently. “There’s a patch of swamp land yonder that will make a good landing place. We’ll put him ‘ashore’ there. I guess he can find his way home.”

“The only thing to do with him,” declared the captain. “Of all the ongrateful scaramouches ever I seed, he’s the wustest.”

Jack set the craft on a downward glide and came to earth on the edge of a patch of swampy land of some extent. The spot that he had selected for a landing was slightly higher than the rest and was comparatively dry. The big craft came down without a bump, and the pumps began sucking gas from the bag to render the machine less buoyant.

“Now then, you imp of the woods, git up on your hind legs and skeedaddle,” advised the captain, yanking the Indian to his feet.

The fellow uttered a cry of amazement as he saw that he was once more on the earth. He looked wildly around him for an instant.

“Go on. Be off with you!” admonished the captain. “You’ve made us trouble enough.”

Without a word the Indian made a rush for the side of the machine. With one bound he was over it and in another minute the forest had swallowed up his rapidly retreating form. Naturally this incident, which had its serious as well as its ludicrous side, came in for a good deal of discussion by the adventurers, while the bag was being refilled.

In the midst of the............