Dashing along the rough country road, with every sense on the alert, Peggy found mental occupation enough to drive gloomier thoughts from her mind.  The Prescott’s car was a good one, with a powerful, sixty-horse motor, and splendidly upholstered.  It was painted a dark blue, and was known in the surrounding country as “The Blue Bird.”  It had been purchased with the money made by the brother and sister from their shares in James Bell’s desert mine.

Far above them sailed the aeroplane, its two occupants from time to time waving at their pretty sisters below.  But in the upper-air currents, it would have been dangerous to drive at a pace slow enough to keep level with the automobile, and so the aeroplane soon dashed on ahead.  From time to time, however, it made circles and swoops, which brought it sometimes in seemingly dangerous closeness to the tree-tops.

All at once Peggy stopped the automobile with a jerk which almost threw Jess, who was unprepared for the shock, out of the car.

“Good gracious, Peggy, what are you trying to do?” she gasped.

“Look!” cried Peggy, pointing with wide eyes.

In the center of the road lay a rolled-up bundle of papers secured with a rubber band.

“Somebody has dropped something from another auto or a wagon,” cried Jess.

“I think so,” said Peggy in excited tones, as she descended from the car, “and I’ve an idea that these papers have been dropped from Mr. Harding’s car.  It must have been the only one to pass here recently, as this road runs direct to the farm and nowhere else.”

She stooped down in the road and picked up the bundle and then, with a beating heart, she opened it.  But for an inward intuition of what its contents would prove to be, Peggy, with her rigid ideas of honor, could not have brought herself to do this.  As her eyes fell on the first sheet, and she saw that it was covered with annotations and sketches, she gave a little cry.

“Oh, Jess!  The luck!  The wonderful, wonderful luck!”

“Why, what is it?  A bundle of thousand-dollar bills, or——­”

“It isn’t that or anything,” cried Peggy; “it’s—­oh, Jess—­it’s the sketches and plans of our aeroplane that Mortlake and his accomplice Harding were spiriting away.”

“They must have dropped them from their automobile,” said Jess.

“Or, more likely, from the pockets of one of them.  See, the ground is trampled about here.  It looks to me as if they had had a break-down, and were fixing it when the papers fell out and were left behind unnoticed.  Oh, what a bit of luck!  If they had had those papers, it would have meant——­”

A shrill cry from Jess interrupted her.  At the same moment Peggy became conscious of a presence behind her.  She wheeled sharply and found herself facing two bloated-faced individuals, one of whom carried a heavy cudgel.  Their clothes and broken boots, and their leering, odious appearance at once proclaimed them of the genus tramp.