well as before. Perhaps
there will be a lot of elephants in the pygmies' land."

"I was only thinking that we can't go on forever in the airship."
said Mr. Anderson. "You'll have to go back to civilization soon,
won't you, Tom, to get gasolene?"

"No, we have enough for at least a month," answered the young
inventor. "I took aboard an unusually large supply when we started."

"What would happen if we ran out of it in the jungle?" asked Ned.
"Bless my pocketbook! What an unpleasant question!" exclaimed Mr.
Damon. "You are almost as cheerful, Ned, as was my friend Mr.
Parker, the gloomy scientist, who was always predicting dire
happenings."

"Well, I was only wondering," said Ned, who was a little abashed by
the manner in which his inquiry was received.

"Oh, it would be all right," declared Tom. "We would simply become a
balloon, and in time the wind would blow us to some white
settlement. There is plenty of material for making the lifting gas."

This was reassuring, and, somewhat easier in mind, Ned took his
place in the observation tower which looked down on the jungle over
which they were passing.

It was a dense forest. At times there could be seen, in the little
clearings, animals darting along. There were numbers of monkeys, an
occasional herd of buffaloes were observed, sometimes a solitary
stray elephant was noted, and as for birds, there were thousands of
them. It was like living over a circus, Ned declared.

They had descended one day just outside a large native village to
make inquiries about elephants and the red pygmies. Of the big
beasts no signs had been seen in several months, the hunters of the
tribe told Mr. Durban. And concerning the red pygmies, the blacks
seemed indisposed to talk.

Tom and the others could not understand this, until a witch-doctor,
whom the elephant hunter had met some time ago, when he was on a
previous expedition, told him that the tribe had a superstitious
fear of speaking of the little men.

"They may be around us--in the forest or jungle at any minute," the
witch-doctor said. "We never speak of them."

"Say, do you suppose that can be a clew?" asked Tom eagerly. "They
may be nearer at hand than we think."

"It's possible." admitted the hunter. "Suppose we stay here for a
few days, and I'll see if I can't get some of the natives to go off
scouting in the woods, and locate them, or at least put us on the
trail of the red dwarfs."

This was considered good advic