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CHAPTER I.
ROB SURPRISES A COW-PUNCHER
Northward from Truxton, Arizona, the desert stretches a red-hot, sandy arm, the elbow of which crooks about several arid ranges of baked hills clothed with a scanty growth of chaparral. Across this sun-bitten solitude of sand and sage brush extend two parallel steel lines – the branch of the Southern Pacific which at Truxton takes a bold plunge into the white solitudes of the dry country.
Scattered few and far between on the monotonous level are desert towns, overtopped by lofty water tanks, perched on steel towers, in the place of trees, and sun-baked like everything else in the "great sandy." These isolated communities, the railroad serves. Twice a day, with the deliberate pace of the Gila Monster, a dusty train of three cars, drawn by a locomotive of obsolete pattern, – which has been not inaptly compared to a tailor's goose with a fire in it – makes its slow way.
Rumbling through a gloomy, rock-walled cut traversing the barren range of the Sierra Tortilla, the railroad emerges – after much bumping through scorched foothills and rattling over straddle-legged trestles above dry arroyos – at Mesaville. Mesaville stands on the south bank of the San Pedro, a scanty branch of the Gila River. To the south of this little desert community, across the quivering stretches of glaring sand and mesquite, there hangs always a blue cloud – the Santa Catapina Range.
The blazing noonday sun lay smitingly over Mesaville and the inhabitants of that town, when on a September day the dust-powdered train before referred to drew up groaningly at the depot, and from one of its forward cars there emerged three boys of a type strange to the primitive settlement.
The eldest of the three, a boy of about seventeen, whom his two friends addressed as Rob, was Rob Blake, whom readers of the Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol – the first volume of this series – have met before. His companions were Corporal Merritt Crawford of the same patrol, and the rotund Tubby Hopkins, the son of widow Hopkins of Hampton, Long Island, from which village all three, in fact, came.
"Well, here we are at Mesaville."
Rob Blake gazed across the hot tracks at the row of raw buildings opposite as he spoke, and the town gazed back in frank curiosity at him. Opposite the depot was a small hotel, on the porch of which several figures had been seated with their chairs tilted back, and their feet on the rail, as the train rolled in.
As it pulled out again, leaving the boys and an imposing pile of baggage exposed to the view of the Mesavillians, six pairs of feet were removed from the porch-rails as if by machinery, and their several owners bent forward in a frank stare at the newcomers.
"Must think a circus has come to town," commented Tubby.
"Well, they know where to look for the elephant," teased Merritt mischievously.
"And for the laughing hyena, too, I guess," parried the fat youth, as the corporal went off into a paroxysm of suddenly checked laughter.
The boys had bought sombreros at Truxton, and in their baggage was clothing of the kind which Harry Harkness – at whose invitation they had come to this part of the country – had advised them to buy. But as they still wore their light summer suits of Eastern cut and make, their generally "different" look from the members of the Mesaville Hotel Loungers' Association was quite sufficient to excite the attention of the latter.
Readers of the Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol will recall that in that book was related the formation of the patrol at Hampton Harbor, L. I., and how it had been effected. How the boys of the patrol had many opportunities to show that they were true scouts was also told. Notably was this so in the incident of the stolen uniforms, in which the boys' enemies, Jack Curtiss, Bill Bender and Hank Handcraft, a disreputable old town character, were implicated.
It will also be remembered that while encamped on an island near their home village, the Boy Scouts put off in a motor dory to the rescue of a stranded cattle ship on which Mr. Harkness, a cattle rancher, and his son Harry, a lad of the boys' own age, were returning from London, whither they had just taken a big consignment of stock. In return for their services, including the summoning of aid by wireless, Mr. Harkness invited the boys to spend some time on his cattle range. What adventurous boys would not have leaped at the invitation? But for a time it appeared as if it would be impossible for Rob and his chums to accept it, owing to the fact that the Hampton Academy, which they all attended, resumed its school term early in the fall.
Just at this time, however, something happened which was very welcome to all three of the Scouts. Serious defects had been discovered in the foundation of the Academy, and it had been decided that it would be unsafe for the scholars to reassemble till these had been remedied. It was estimated that the work would take two months or more. Thus it had come about that the invitation of Mr. Harkness was accepted. To the boys' regret, however, only the members of the Patrol who stood that day on the platform at Mesaville had been able to obtain the consent of their parents to take the long, and to Eastern eyes, hazardous, trip.
Arrangements had been made by letter for Harry Harkness, the rancher's son, to meet the boys at Mesaville, but the train had rolled in and rolled out again without his putting in an appearance.
"Maybe Harry fell in that river and was drowned," suggested Tubby, pointing ahead down the tracks to the trestle crossing the San Pedro River. At this time of the year the so-called river was a mere trickle of mud-colored water, threading its way between high, sandy banks. The boys burst into a laugh at the idea of any one's drowning in it.
"He'll be here before long," said Rob confidently. "It's a drive of more than fifty miles to the ranch, remember, and we can't start out till to-morrow morning, anyhow."
Just then a white-aproned Chinaman appeared on the porch of the hotel and vigorously rang a bell. At the signal the lounging cow-punchers and plainsmen rose languidly from their chairs and bolted into the dining-room. From the few stores also appeared the merchants of Mesaville, most of whom lived at the hotel.
"Sounds like dinner," remarked Tubby hopefully, sniffing the air on which an odor of food was wafted across the tracks. "Smells like it, too."
"Trust Tubby to detect grub," laughed Rob.
"He's a culinary Sherlock Holmes," declared Merritt, but his remark was made to Rob alone, for Tubby was beyond the reach of his sarcasm. He had started at once to cross the tracks and find the dining-room.
"I guess it wouldn't be a bad idea to have something to eat while we're waiting," said Rob. "Let's go over."
Tubby was already installed in a seat at the long table when his chums entered. He had in front of him a plate of soup, on the top of which floated a sort of upper crust of grease. From time to time an investigating fly ventured too near the edge and was miserably drowned. It was Tubby's initiation into desert hotel life, and he didn't look as if he was enjoying it.
On both sides of the table, however, the cow-punchers, teamsters, and Mesaville commercial lights, were shoveling away their food without the flicker of an eyelash. Opposite to Tubby were seated two young fellows in cowboy garb, who seemed to extract much noisy amusement from watching the stout youth eat. They didn't seem to care if he overheard their somewhat personal remarks.
"Ah, there's a lad who'll be a help to his folks when he grows up," grinned one of the stout boy's tormentors, as Rob and Merritt took their seats.
"Which will be before you do," placidly murmured Tubby, continuing to eat his soup.
A shout of laughter went up at this, and it wasn't at Tubby's expense, either.
The two youths who had been so anxious to display their wit reddened, and one of them angrily said something about "the fresh tenderfoot."
"Here's two more of 'em," tittered the other, as Merritt and Rob came in. Rob wore on his breast, but pinned on his waistcoat and out of sight, the Red Honor for lifesaving, which had been presented to him for heroism at the time of the waterlogging of the hydroplane, as narrated in the Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol. Merritt also wore the decoration in the same inconspicuous place.
As the leader of the Eagle Patrol sat down, however, his coat caught against Tubby's shoulder and was thrown back, exposing the decoration.
"Oh! ho! Look at the tenderfoot's medal," chuckled one of the young cattlemen; "wonder what it's for?"
"The championship of the bread and milk eaters of New York State, I reckon," grinned the other, and another shout of laughter bore witness to the table's approval of this primitive humor.
Rob flushed angrily, but said nothing. He did not wish to stir up trouble with two such ill-mannered young boors as the cattle-punchers were showing themselves to be. Encouraged by his silence, the badgering went on. One by one the other guests had been served by the Chinese attendant, with raisin pie and half-melted cheese, and had arisen and left the room. The two young cow-punchers and the Boy Scouts were shortly left alone in the fly-infested apartment. Rob and Merritt, who found the surroundings little to their liking, hurried through their meal, but Tubby ate conscientiously through everything that was brought him.
It now grew plain, even if it had not been so before, that the two sun-burned young plainsmen sitting opposite the boys were deliberately trying to aggravate them.
Interpreting the boys' silence as fear, they grew bolder and bolder in their remarks.
"Have to catch up a real cow, I reckon," dreamily went on one of the boys' tormentors, gazing at the ceiling abstractedly, but fingering the condensed milk can.
"What for?" inquired the other, playing into his hand.
"Why, the tin cow might disagree with mama's boys."
"Ho-ho-ho! Say, Clark."
"What, Jess?"
"Reckon they must be overstocked with yearlings East."
"Looks that way. Do you suppose Easterners are born or jest grow?"
The youth addressed by his companion as Jess looked straight at Rob as he spoke, and the insult was unmistakable. Rob's self-control suddenly deserted him with a rush.
"I'll answer for your friend," he snapped out. "They grow-and-they-grow-right."
Tubby looked up in surprise from his raisin pie, and Merritt's eyes opened wide at Rob's tone. It foreboded trouble as sure as a hurricane signal foretells a storm.
"My! my!" grinned Jess, but it was an uncomfortable sort of a grin, "hear the little boy with the medal talk. Come on, Clark, let's go see to the ponies while the tenderfeet wait for their nurse to come and take their bibs off."
They rose from the table, but Rob, still inwardly raging but outwardly cool as ice, stopped them.
"Say," he said, "are you fellows cattlemen?"
"You bet, stranger, from the ground up," rejoined Clark, with a vast air of self-importance.
"Well, then we've been misinformed in the East," said Rob, coolly brushing a few stray crumbs from his knees.
"How's that?"
"Why, we'd been told that cattlemen were natural gentlemen; but whoever told us that was dead wrong. Judging by you fellows, they're not natural, and certainly not the other thing."
Clark's face grew crimson and he muttered something about "fixing the fresh kid," but his companion drew him away.
"We'll have plenty of time to rope and brand these young mavericks," he said, as they left the room.
As they vanished Rob burst into a shout of laughter.
"Score one for the Boy Scouts," he said. "If ever there were two discomfited cow-punchers, those fellows are it."
The landlord, who had entered the room a few moments before, came forward as the boys arose from the table. He was a tall, lanky man, with a look of perpetual gloom on his face. A drooping, straw-colored mustache did not help to enliven his funereal features.
"Say, strangers," he said, in a dismal voice, "you've started in bad."
"How's that?" inquired Rob, in a somewhat peppery tone.
"Why, riling up Clark Jennings and Jess Randell; they's two of the toughest boys in the country."
"Think so, I guess," snorted Tubby.
"Well, wait and see," said the landlord, with a melancholy shrug of his sloping shoulders. "Three dinners, please."
He extended a yellow palm.
"How much?" asked Rob, putting his hand in his pocket.
"Three dollars and six bits."
"What! three dollars and seventy-five cents for that fly-ridden stuff?"
"That's the charge, stranger."
Rob, seeing there was no use arguing, paid over the money, in exchange for which they had received three greasy plates of soup, three portions of ragged, overdone bull beef, and three slabs of raisin pie, together with three cups of muddy, inky coffee. But a sudden impulse of curiosity gripped him.
"Say, what's the twenty-five cents extra all round for?" he asked.
"Fer your ponies," rejoined the landlord, more miserably than ever. He seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears.
"Ponies!" gasped Rob. "We haven't got any."
"Never mind, it's a rule of the house," said the landlord, as if that settled the matter; "and if you ain't got any ponies it ain't my fault, is it?"
There was no answering this sort of logic, and the boys strolled out to the porch to see if they could sight any trace of Harry Harkness. There was no sign of him, however, and after a prolonged period of gazing across the blazing desert, the boys sank back in three of the big rockers that stood in a row on the porch. It was dull, sitting there in the intense heat and drowsy silence, broken only at long intervals by the clatter of a pony's hoofs as some cow-puncher ambled by at an easy lope. A loud snore from Tubby soon proclaimed that he was off, and Merritt and Rob were about to follow him into the land of dreams, when there came a sudden interruption.
Rob felt his shoulder roughly seized from behind, and a harsh, mandatory voice addressed him:
"Say, that's my chair you're sitting in. You'll have to get out."
The boy turned and saw Clark Jennings glaring at him. Close beside him, with a grin on his face, was Jess Randell.
"Even supposing it is your chair," said Rob, "you can ask me for it like a gentleman, – then," he added to himself, "I'll think over giving it to you."
"Oh, I guess you think you're a mighty fine gentleman?"
"I hope I am one, yes."
"Well, out here gentlemen have to fight for their title. Are you going to give me that chair?"
"As you are no more a guest of this hotel than I am, I shall sit here till I get ready to get up."
"Then I'll have to help you out – Ouch!"
The remark and the exclamation came close together. Clark Jennings had bent forward as he spoke, and roughly laid hold of Rob to pull him from the chair by main force. As he did so, however, Rob had suddenly changed from a passive, rather sleepy boy, to a bundle of steel springs full of fight. Clark Jennings, as he laid hold of Rob, had felt himself hurled backward. Unable to check his impetus, he had landed against the wall of the hotel with a force which caused him to give vent to the exclamation recorded.
"Look out, tenderfoot, he'll kill yer," warned the melancholy landlord from the window of the office, where he had been entering in a greasy book the extortion practiced on the boys.
Several cow-punchers awoke to interest at the same time as Tubby and Merritt began to realize what was happening.
His eyes blazing with fury, Clark Jennings crouched low, and then reaching back drew a revolver from his hip. He aimed it full at Rob, but simultaneously a strange thing happened. Rob was seen to dart forward, diving right under the leveled pistol. The next instant the weapon was spinning through the air. It landed with a thump in the middle of the dusty road. But Clark Jennings didn't see it, for the excellent reason that at that precise moment he was lying flat on his back on the hotel veranda. Before his eyes swam a whole galaxy of constellations. Over him stood Rob, with flushed face and clinched fists.
CHAPTER II.
NEWS OF THE MOQUIS
"Wow!" yelled the onlookers, as Clark's body struck the floor with a resounding thwack.
Jess was in an agony of excitement over the sudden downfall of his friend. He was just about to hurl himself upon Rob when a sudden detaining arm fell on his with a heavy pressure.
"Hold on there. We want fair play."
It was Merritt Crawford who spoke, and Jess sullenly dropped his belligerent look. Somehow, the happenings of the last few seconds had altered the aspect of the tenderfeet materially in the eyes of the two young cow-punchers.
"I'll fix you," growled Clark furiously, scrambling to his feet.
"Why did you let him get up?" asked Tubby, his round cheeks glowing with excitement.
"Because I want to give him plenty of rope," said Rob, a grim look creeping over his usually pleasant face.
A sudden furious onrush on the part of Clark prohibited further conversation.
"Go in and eat him up, Clark!" shouted a lanky, long-legged cow-puncher, one of several who had been attracted by the rumpus.
"Looks as if your friend had developed a sudden attack of indigestion," grinned Tubby delightedly, as Rob's fist collided with the advancing Clark's jaw, much to the latter's astonishment.
"Never seed nothing like it," commented the landlord, somewhat less melancholy now. "Clark's the champeen round here."
"He may be when he's got a gun to back him up, but not when he has to fall back on his fists," retorted Merritt.
"Look out!" he yelled suddenly, as the young cow-puncher, finding that fair methods seemed to have failed, attempted a foul blow below Rob's belt.
But there was no need of the warning. Rob had seen the blow coming halfway, swiftly delivered as it was. The cowardly attempt at foul tactics thoroughly enraged him.
"I thought Westerners fought fair," he gritted out, gripping the astonished cow-puncher by the wrist of the offending hand. Before Clark could gasp his astonishment, his other wrist was captive.
Then a strange thing happened. Before any one had time to realize just how it occurred, Clark's body was describing a sweeping arc in the air. His heels rushed through the atmosphere fully five feet from the floor. Like the lash of a whip, his powerless body was straightened out as he reached the limit of the aerial curve he had described. At the same instant a dismayed yell broke from his pallid lips as Rob let go.
Over the veranda rail, and out into the dusty road the young cow-puncher followed his revolver. He landed in a heap in the white dust, while Rob yelled triumphantly:
"Now pick up your gun and profit by the lesson in manners I've given you."
So saying, the boy calmly seated himself once more in the disputed chair, only a slight, quick movement of his chest betraying the great physical effort he had been through. After all, surprising as it had seemed, there was nothing very amazing about Rob's achievement. At the Hampton Academy athletics had always been a boast. The trick Rob had just put into execution he had learned from his physical instructor, who in his turn had picked it up from a Samurai wrestler of Japan. But to the cowboys, and other loungers about the Mesaville Hotel, the feat had been little short of marvelous.
They eagerly thronged about the boy as he took his seat once more, and this time he remained in undisputed possession of it.
"Whip-sawed, that's what Clark was," exclaimed one of the group.
Another, the same tall, lanky fellow who had just been urging the young cow-puncher on to what he thought would be an easy victory, approached Rob.
"Say, stranger," he asked eagerly, "will you teach me that thar contraption?"
"Couldn't do it," rejoined Rob soberly, although a smile played about the corners of his lips.
"Why not?"
"Because, then, you'd know as much as I do," responded Rob. The assemblage burst into a loud roar of laughter, in which you may be sure, however, there were two voices which did not join. Those two were Clark Jennings' and Jess Randell's. The former had just picked himself up and stuffed his gun in his pistol pocket. A malevolent scowl marked his face as he did so. Nor did Jess smooth over matters by remarking audibly:
"Say, Clark, what was the matter with you?"
"Chilled feet, I guess," chortled Tubby, who had overheard the remark.
"Get away from me, can't you?" snarled Clark irritably, facing round on his well-meaning crony, "why didn't you help me out?"
"Help you out – how?"
"Why, trip that tenderfoot up when I rushed him."
"Oh, shucks, I thought you fought fair," said Jess, a little disgusted in spite of himself.
"So I do," snorted Clark, "when I'm winning."
"Well, come on round and see to the ponies. We'll think up some way to get even with these grain-fed mavericks before very long," comforted Jess.
"You bet, and in a way they won't forget, either," Clark Jennings promised himself, as he followed his companion to the corral.
Not long after this, the boys perceived, far out on the sultry plain, a sudden swirl of dust.
"Something coming," shouted Tubby, who, strange to say, had been the first to notice the approaching column of dust.
"Team," briefly grunted the landlord, "did I hear you fellers say you was waiting for some one from the Harkness range?"
"Yes, you did," said Rob.
"Waal, I guess that's them now. Must have a bear-cat of a team in to kick up all that smother."
Closer and closer grew the dust cloud, and presently, from its yellow swirls, emerged the heads of the leaders of an eight-mule team. Behind them lumbered a big, broad-tired wagon, from the bed of which a high seat was reared like a watch tower. By the driver's side was a long iron foot brake. As the team approached the bank of the sandy little dried-up river, where the road took a dip, the driver placed his foot on the brake and a loud screeching and groaning resulted, as the big wagon, with the hind wheels locked, slid down the far bank. As the front wheels thundered across the rough bridge above the thin thread of luke-warm water, the heads of the first mules emerged over the top of the bank nearest the hotel.
"Mountain style," commented the long, lanky cow-puncher admiringly, as the driver, a tall, sun-burned lad of about Rob's age, whirled a long whip three or four times round his head and concluded the flourish with a loud "crack" as sharp and penetrating as a pistol shot.
An instant later the heavy wagon and its eight, dust-choked, sweating mules swept up in front of the hotel porch. The driver, flinging the single line with which he drove to his companion, clambered from his lofty perch and was immediately surrounded by the three tenderfeet.
"Well, you certainly come into town with a flourish of trumpets," laughed Rob, after the first salutations between the Eastern boys and Harry Harkness, the rancher's son, had been exchanged.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting so long," responded the other, who in order to speak had pulled down a big red handkerchief which had bundled up the lower part of his face and kept it dust-proof while he drove; "but the fact is, we had some trouble on the way. A bunch of Moquis are out, and – "
"Indians!" gasped Tubby, with round eyes.
"Yes, regular Indians," laughed Harry; "the Moquis' reservation is off a hundred miles or more to the northwest, near Fort Miles, but – "
"They're off the reservation," cut in Tubby, proud of his knowledge.
"Out fer a snake dance, I reckon," put in the long, lanky cow-puncher, who had been an interested listener.
"Why, hello, Lone Star," exclaimed Harry. "I didn't know you were in town. Yes," he went on, "there's a secret valley in the Santa Catapinas which has been used by them for centuries for their festivals, and although they are supposed to be kept within the limits of the reservation, every once in a while a bunch of them get over here and hold a snake dance."
"I've read about them," said Rob; "they do all kinds of weird things with rattlesnakes, don't they?"