om took a think, and
struck another idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box
revolver, and then sail away while the others stopped to fight over the
carcass. So he stopped the balloon still, and done it, and then we sailed
off while the fuss was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off,
and they helped me aboard; but by the time we was out of reach again,
that gang was on hand once more. And when they see we was really gone and
they couldn't get us, they sat down on their hams and looked up at us so
kind of disappointed that it was as much as a person could do not to see
THEIR side of the matter.

CHAPTER VI. IT'S A CARAVAN

I WAS so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so I
made straight for my locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a
body couldn't get back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom give
the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft.

We had to go up a mile before we struck comfortable weather where it was
breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all straight
again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps up and
says:

"I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We're in the Great
Sahara, as sure as guns!"

He was so excited he couldn't hold still; but I wasn't. I says:

"Well, then, where's the Great Sahara? In England or in Scotland?"

"'Tain't in either; it's in Africa."

Jim's eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of
interest, because that was where his originals come from; but I didn't
more than half believe it. I couldn't, you know; it seemed too awful far
away for us to have traveled.

But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it, and said the lions
and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could 'a' found
out, before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres, if
he had thought of one thing; and when we asked him what, he said:

"These clocks. They're chronometers. You always read about them in sea
voyages. One of them is keeping Grinnage time, and the other is keeping
St. Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis it was four in the
afternoon by my watch and this clock, and it was ten at night by this
Grinnage clock. Well, at this time of the year the sun sets at about
seven o'clock. Now I noticed the time yesterday evening when the sun went
down, and it was half-past five o'clock by the Grinnage clock, and half
past 11 A.M. by