alive that one hope,--that even yet he
might be able to discover a clew to his loved and lost ones.

"Not alive; I have long since abandoned that faint hope. But if I might
only find something to make sure, something that I could pray over, then
bury where my heart could hover above--"

"You are still alive, good friend, yet you have spent long years out
here in the wilderness," gently suggested the professor.

Edgecombe flinched, as one might when a rude hand touches a still raw
wound.

"But they, my wife, my baby girl,--they could never have lived as I have
existed. They surely must have perished; if not at once, then when the
first cruel storms of hideous winter came howling down from the far
north!"

"Unless they were found and rescued by--who knows, my good sir?" forcing
a cheerful smile, which, unfortunately, was only surface-born, as the
exile lifted his head with a start and a gasping ejaculation. "Since it
seems fairly well proven that this supposedly unknown land is actually
inhabited, why may your loved ones not have been rescued?"

"The Indians? You mean by the Aztecs, sir?"

"If Aztecans they should really prove; why not?"

"But, surely I have heard--sacrifices?" huskily breathed the greatly
agitated man, while the professor, realising how he was making a bad
matter worse, brazenly falsified the records, declaring that no human
sacrifices had ever stained the record of that noble, honourable,
gallant race; and then changed the subject as quickly as might be.

Nevertheless, there was one good effect following that talk. Cooper
Edgecombe had dreaded nothing so much as the fear of being left behind
by these, the first white people he had seen for what seemed more than
an ordinary lifetime; but now, when the professor hinted at a longing to
take a spin through ether, for the purpose of winning a wider view,
he eagerly seconded that idea, even while realising that it would be
difficult to take him along with the rest.

Still, nothing was definitely settled that evening, and at a fairly
respectable hour before the turn of night, the air-voyagers were wrapped
in their blankets and soundly slumbering.

Not so the exile. Sleep was far from his brain, and while he really
knew that danger could hardly menace that wondrous bit of ingenious
mechanism, he watched it throughout that long night, ready to risk his
own life in its defence should the occasion arise.

Why not, since his whole future depended upo