in tones that asked for confirmation. “Port fuselage is topmost. Looks spiff to me.”
Alice did not give it. She was already inspecting the double fuselages that contained the gas bags. They hung in the crushed aspens that had stopped their slide, but the trees had bent rather than broken.
“Tigg, Andrew, Lizzie, run round to starboard. Listen for a whistle—that’ll be a leak. Claire, Maggie, you’re with me on the port side.”
Just below the bow on the starboard side, the canvas had been gashed, and air was leaking out with a continuous sigh of hopelessness. If Alice had been brisk before, now she really swung into action. She sent Tigg up into a tree with a bucket and brush and, from the ground, instructed him how to patch it, and when the awful hissing had stopped, she let out a breath as if she’d been holding it the whole time.
“The fuselage is my biggest worry,” she confessed to Claire as Andrew and Tigg cleared saplings, aiming to use one of the taller trees as a mooring mast. “The Lass can lose a lot and still fly, but she ain’t going anywhere without lift.”
“We should like to go anywhere as soon as possible,” Claire agreed.
“Say, where’s the girls?”
Claire looked around her. Aspens, poplars—chunks of tumbled granite—gently blowing grass—and a hundred feet away, the silvery glint of the river that had cut this swath broadly enough for them to land beside it. On a pile of rocks that caused the river to eddy and swing in a new direction, she spotted two little figures, hands shading their eyes as they looked into the distance and turned to cover the points of the compass.
“There. Scouting.” She pointed, rather proudly.
“They ought to let us know before they disappear.”
“You may certainly suggest it. But they know their duty and it would seem strange to them to warn me they’re going to do it.”
Alice shook her head and returned to her inspection of the partially buried gondola. “Not like any little girls I ever met. I bet they wouldn’t know what to do with a doll if you gave ’em one.”
Claire remembered her own nursery and the row of abandoned dolls on the top shelf of the bookcase. “Papa used to give me a doll every year for Christmas.” She knelt to inspect a brass plate in the hull, bent nearly double with the force of the landing, but salvageable. “He gave upot“He gp when I was eight and my nurse reported to Mama that I was disassembling them and making notes on their anatomy. Which, I discovered, bore no resemblance to actual human babies’ anatomy at all.”
Alice’s brow lightened a little and she almost smiled through her worry. “I ain’t never had a doll. I wouldn’t know what to do with one, either.”
“You have the automatons. Theirs may only bear a nodding resemblance to human anatomy, but at least they’re useful. Dolls, I’m afraid, are not.”
By the time the Mopsies ran up, panting, to report, Alice had finished inspecting as much of the hull as she could see. The rest would have to wait until the gas bags had been inflated once again, and the hull lifted to its normal resting altitude of a few feet.
“You sure picked a good place to crash,” Maggie informed Jake and Andrew. “Ent a soul or an ’ouse or so much as an eyelash to be seen for miles an’ miles.”
“There is a bunch of mucky great creatures on t’other side of t’river, though,” Lizzie put in. “Horns on ’em as big as Tigg.”
“I suspect those might be elk,” Andrew said. “They possess antlers, which are solid. Cows have horns, which are hollow.”
Lizzie did not look impressed by the distinction. “Solid—hollow—they’re pointy, is what I’m sayin’. Big and pointy.”
“Duly noted,” Claire said. “And no sign of any source of help. Well, on the positive side, neither is there any danger … of the human sort, at least. We shall only have to worry about bears.”
“There was a bear due east of where you found me in the Texican Territory. I have no doubt there are similar creatures here in the Idaho Territory.”
“If you folks are done with the nature lesson,” Alice put in with barely concealed impatience, “can we get the pump going and get some gas into the bags? That patch oughta be dry enough to hold now.”
The pump turned out to be an automaton named Eight, who had hose concealed in his