Noting the look of surprise on the little fellow’s brown face, and realizing that he was totally ignorant in connection with what his words meant, Frank proceeded to tell how the hotel in Centerville was burned, and what a part Jerry and himself had had in the rescue of the balloonist, who had taken a sleeping powder, and lay in his room, unconscious of the tumult and peril.

Jerry meanwhile was making as good use of the marine glasses as he knew how.

“See anything that looks like the wreckage of a balloon on the water?” asked Frank, as he swept the horizon with his naked eye, but in vain.

“Not a beastly thing,” returned the other, in a disappointed tone.

“Oh, I’m afraid we’ve come in the wrong direction,” sighed tender-hearted Will, shaking his head dubiously; “and it’s just terrible to think that those poor chaps may be drowning right now, and our little boat so near at hand!”

“Tell me about that, will you?  There he goes as usual, making us feel like murderers or something, when we only want a chance to get in our fine rescuing act.  Stop him talking that way, Frank, won’t you?” pleaded Bluff, who had emptied all the sand out of the bag dropped by the drifting balloonists, and declared he meant to hang the same up in his den at home as a memento of the wonderful incident.

Frank stood up to see the better.

Carefully he scanned the horizon, beginning at the furthest possible quarter toward the south, and ranging to one equally improbable northward.

And everywhere it seemed to be the same dead level line, with not a break that gave signs of promise.

“And the strange thing about it all is that there doesn’t seem to be a solitary vessel, big or little, in sight anywhere.  It would be hard at any other time to find the gulf around here so utterly forsaken,” he remarked, beginning to feel discouraged himself.

“It certainly looks as though we had the field to ourselves,” remarked Bluff; “here we’ve come some miles from shore, which is getting ‘hull-down,’ as the sailors say, in the distance, and yet not a peep of the lost balloonists.  How much further ought we go, Frank?”

“Just as long as there seems to be the slightest chance of our striking those we’re looking for, or we can see shore with the glasses.  I, for one, would never be satisfied to give up, and then later on feel that we might have found them if we’d only kept out another mile or two.”

“My sentiments, exactly,” declared Will, who possessed a tender heart, as his chums knew from experience.

So the time crept on.

Frank was bending above the motor, but all the while he kept one eye over his shoulder on the bow of the boat where his chum stood, still sweeping the sea ahead with the marine glasses.

In fact, every one aboard seemed to have his gaze focussed on Jerry by this time, as though he might be the one to decide whether the hunt had better be abandoned right then and there, or kept up still longer.