They had come down to three thousand feet when it became evident that only rough ridges lay beneath them.  No landing-place here, certainly.  They could only hang on as long as possible in the hope the ridges would give way to level ground.  Bruce thanked their luck for the wide-spreading wings which would impede their fall.

A moment later he groaned, for just ahead of them he saw a rocky ridge higher than any they had passed over.  Here then was the end, he thought.  But the tricky moonlight had deceived him.  They cleared those rocks by a hundred feet and just beyond Bruce gasped and looked again.

“A miracle!” murmured Barney.

“Or a mirage,” whispered Bruce.

Before them lay a square of level land, green,—­in the moonlight.  All about the square the land was black with trees, but there was a landing place.  It was as if their trip had been long planned, their coming anticipated, and that a level field was cleared for them.

It was only a matter of moments till they were bumping along over the ground.  Soon they were standing free from their harnesses and silently shaking hands.

Barney was the first to speak.

“Say, do you know,” he said, “we’re in somebody’s wheat-field!”

“Impossible!” exclaimed the Major.

“See for yourself,” The boy held before their astonished eyes a handful of almost ripened heads of wheat.

“Then what’s happened?” demanded the Major.  “Have you gone due south by west instead of north by west?”

“Unless my compass lied, and it has never done so before, we have gone north by west since we started, and we are—­or ought to be at this moment—­four hundred miles from what the white man calls civilization.”

“Well,” said the Major, “since we are here, wherever that is, I suggest that we unpack our blankets and get out of the man’s wheat-field, whoever he may be.  The mystery will keep until morning.”

This they proceeded to do.

A clump of stubby, heavy-stemmed spruce trees offered them shelter from the chill night wind, and there, rolled in blankets, they prepared to sleep.

But Bruce could not sleep.  Driving a plane through clouds, mist and sunshine for hours had made every nerve alert.  And the strain of that last sagging slide through the air was not to be relieved instantly.  So he lay there in his blankets, a tumult of ideas in his mind.  This wheat-field now?  Had he really been misdirected by the compass on the plane?  To prove that he had not, he drew from his pocket a small compass, and placing it in a spot of moonlight, took the relative direction of the last ridge over which they had passed and the plane in the wheat-field.  He was right; the compass had been true.  They were four hundred miles northwest of the last mile of track laid on the Hudson Bay Railroad, deep in a wilderness, over which they had traveled for hours without sighting a single sign of white man’s habitation.  Yet, here they were at the edge of a wheat-field.