This was the program that had caused Lord Pelton to remain with Frank and Phil. The Englishman was, of course, familiar with Captain Ludington’s legend of the Kootenai Indians—Koos-ha-nax, and Husha the Black Ram. He had also heard Sam Skinner’s account of Old Indian Chief—or the Sioux Indian mythical mountain ram. When the boys repeated to him the story told by “Grizzly” Hosmer—the account of “Baldy’s Bench” and the great sheep that he had seen there—and realized that this table-land was not more than seventy-five or eighty miles from Smith’s ranch he eagerly entered into the boys’ project.

This was to be an attempt to discover “Baldy’s Bench” with the airship in the hope that some of “Grizzly” Hosmer’s sheep were yet there. The boys even dared to hope that “Old Baldy” himself might be alive. The tinkering on the airship was wholly in preparation[251] for this event. Provisions, blankets, water, a camera and rifles were put aboard; extra gasoline was shipped and all was made ready for an early flight.

At seven o’clock the next morning the Loon was started on its unique voyage. In order that a sight of the monoplane in flight might not make Mr. Mackworth apprehensive, the course laid by Phil—who was at the wheel—did not follow the Goat Creek trail.

Sweeping directly north for a few miles and flying low, the airship was turned west when the hills north of Goat Creek rose high enough to conceal the voyagers.

“All we’ve got to do,” explained Frank to Lord Pelton, “is to go west now for thirty-five miles. When we’ve covered that distance we’ll be near two mountains, Norboe and Osborne. Then we turn north again and ‘Baldy’s Bench’ is forty-five miles away, a little east of north. Hosmer says we’ll know it because it stands all alone in a valley of jack-pines.”

“And you’re goin’ to land on top of it?” asked Lord Pelton.

“If we can.”

[252]

“Then what?”

“Then?” repeated Phil, “we’ll have to get off. It may be much easier to stop than to start.”

In a half hour the two mountain peaks were below the Loon, which was now nearly two thousand feet in the air. Then, as the ship was headed north again, Phil brought it rapidly down. The smaller mountains that flanked the Elk River now gave way to rougher and loftier ranges in the west. In the far northwest, snow clad peaks were already in sight. No streams cut the region beneath the flying airship, but jumbled hills—like the Hog Back Range—pressed into each other or opened in dark, rocky chasms and passes.

At eight o’clock, with eyes only for their rough chart or the horizon ahead, Phil shouted:

“Over there! ‘Grizzly’ told the truth. See! To the right.”

And, while his companions leaned forward eagerly, the Loon was brought into a direct course for a rocky point ahead about fifteen miles away. As it grew larger the hills below dwindled into a flat plain and then the pine[253] wilderness basin took their place. It was “Baldy’s Bench” in its setting of green—a barren island of whitish brown rock in a sea of verdure.

“Bring her around the south side,” cried Frank. “Let’s see that shelf where the big goat killed the lions.”

“And if the sheep are there to-day,” exclaimed the Englishman, “we’ll have a jolly try at them.”

“Don’t shoot,” said Phil, “unless we find a place to land. We haven’t Skinner and Hosmer with us to find our game.”

Phil was now driving not over five hundred feet in the air and directly toward the southern exposure of the “Bench.” The lone peak was rising in the air as if suddenly expanding. When the Loon was almost beneath the Gibraltar-like pile of rock, its steep sides rose to make the highest peak the boys had yet seen. Later, they reckoned the pinnacle not less than 1500 feet above the forest below.

Awed by the glowing wonder of the mountain’s mass, Frank and Lord Pelton were bending their necks to follow its steep sides skyward when Phil called out again.

[254]

“Down there, look! That must be it—the flat shelf.”

There was scarcely time to make out a formation such as Hosmer had told about before the Loon had passed it. But, in all respects, it was such a place as the bear hunter had described. If sheep were there they were not seen.

“Did you see it—the cliff where ‘Old Baldy’ stood when he threw himself down on the lion?” shouted Frank.

“Did I?” answered Phil. “If it wasn’t a hundred feet above the shelf it wasn’t a foot.”

In the next five minutes the Loon made a complete circle of “Baldy’s Bench.” All its faces resembled the southern exposure.

“Do you think a sheep could climb that hill?” asked Lord Pelton.

“You can’t tell,” said Frank. “Those flat cliffs are often pushed out enough to give a footing—for a sheep at least. ‘Grizzly’ says he has seen sheep scramble up sixty degree inclines. And sixty degrees to us looks like a perpendicular wall.”

“There’s one anyway,” yelled Phil again[255] when the Loon had almost completed its circuit. As he pointed to what seemed an absolutely unscalable point several hundred feet above them, all clearly made out the dark brown, almost black, shape of a statue-like mountain sheep. With head lowered, its horns curved outward and backward and its long wool reaching far down over its short legs, it suggested a musk ox.

“If that ram can get there,” shouted Frank, “he can go all the way. Let’s get up higher. There may be a place on the top where they do their loafin’. If we don’t see anything better, we’ll come back and try for this boy.”

“Lift her,” shouted Frank. “Let’s get a look at the top of the hill.”

With a suddenness that almost threw Lord Pelton off the seat which he had not left for an hour and a half—for it was now eight thirty o’clock—Phil tilted the movable wings of the Loon upward and, like a train on a sudden grade, the propellers slowed up as they pushed the enlarged plane surfaces against the air. When the monoplane at last reached the top of the “Bench” it had passed around to the western[256] side. The peak seemed to end in a rocky ridge.

“Over the top,” Frank suggested as Phil dropped his planes and the accelerated propellers shot the airship ahead once more. “Anyway,” he said without much spirit, “we’re six thousand feet in the air. I reckon the ‘Bench’ is about fifteen hundred feet above the valley. We—”

He did not finish. Just then the monoplane passed over the western edge of the summit and the ridge was seen to be only a wall extending around the western a............