The Boy Scouts On The Range

CHAPTER XVI.

BLINKY SPOILS A SOMBRERO

If astonishment and uneasiness were depicted on the countenances of Clark Jennings and his companions, equally amazed looks were cast upon the newcomers by Mr. Harkness's party. The rancher was the first to recover his voice.

"Well, Clark," he said rather sternly, "what are you doing here?"

"We're not stealing sheepmen's land and feed from them, Mr. Harkness," spoke up Clark boldly, as soon as he saw by the rancher's manner that the party was not, as he had at first feared, aware of Rob's strange fate.

"We won't discuss that old question now, Clark," said Mr. Harkness leniently. "As long as there are sheepmen and cattlemen that question will always be productive of strife, more's the pity. Besides, certain fence-cutting incidents – "

"You can't say I cut your fences!" sputtered Clark angrily.

"Certainly not. I never dreamed of doing such a thing – without the proper evidence."

The rancher threw a grim emphasis into these last words.

"What we want from you now, Clark, is information."

"Well?" asked the other in sullen tone.

"We have lost track of a young man who was my guest at the ranch," explained Mr. Harkness, his dislike of being compelled to ask information of Clark Jennings showing in his face. "His name is Rob Blake – "

"Those two fellows know him well enough," broke out Merritt, pointing at Bill Bender and Hank Handcraft. The faces of those two worthies grew green as the boy pointed accusingly at them. Unwittingly Merritt had come near hitting the nail on the head when he connected them in a vague way with Rob's disappearance.

"Well, what if we do know him?" growled Hank sullenly.

"Mr. Harkness knows the mean tricks you put up on us in the East, so you needn't try to pretend you never met us before," went on Merritt angrily.

"Come, come, Merritt," interrupted Mr. Harkness, "this will do no good. Whatever happened in the East is past and gone. What we want to know now is if they have seen Rob?"

"No, we ain't," declared Clark boldly. "Why, do you think he's lost hereabouts?"

"That's what we are afraid of. The Indians carried him off, and here, as you see, they were camped last night. I cherished a hope that he might have had the good fortune to escape."

"I don't know anything about it," rejoined Clark in a more amiable tone, now that he saw that no suspicion attached to him.

"What yer ridin' two on one pony for?" asked Blinky suddenly.

"None of your business," rejoined Clark. "I guess we can ride the way we like."

"Well, I guess so," echoed Hank. "Fine way they interfere with gentlemen's preferences out here in the West."

"You had three ponies when you started out," pursued Blinky, looking at the spurs on Hank's feet, and noting the extra saddle which Clark carried behind him.

"We did not."

"What yer got the extra saddle for, then, and what's he got on spurs for, just ter decorate his handsome figure?"

"Well, I can if I want to, can't I?" demanded Hank.

"We're looking for a stray pony," explained Clark glibly. "That's why we're carrying the saddle – to put on him when we find him. That, too, accounts for the spurs. Anything else you'd like to know?"

"Yes," demanded Merritt, his eyes blazing and his voice shaking with excitement as he stepped forward. "Where did you get Rob Blake's sombrero?"

His eye had fallen on that article of headgear just as Hank had clumsily tried to conceal it. Merritt instantly recognized it by the stamped band about its crown.

"Why, I – we – that is – it's my hat," lied Hank clumsily.

"That's not true, and you know it!" shouted Merritt, carried away by rage. "You know where Rob Blake is. You – "

Crack!

The boy staggered back, half-blinded, as Bill Bender raised his heavy quirt and cut him full across the face with it.

"Come on, boys!" shouted Clark, as Merritt reeled backward. "Let's get out of this."

The two ponies sprang forward, leaving the ranch party half-stunned by the suddenness of Bill's brutal blow. But it was only for a second. In that interval of time Blinky's face had grown wrinkled and drawn with anger, and his hand had slid back to his hip and produced his forty-four. In another instant Bill would have paid dearly for his blow, but the rancher's hand fell on the cow-puncher's arm.

"Not that way, Blinky," he said.

"All right, boss," rejoined Blinky regretfully; "but it would have been a heap of satisfaction to have let daylight into that coyote's carcass."

"Those fellows know where Rob is!" shouted Merritt, across whose face an angry red ridge lay, marking where the quirt had struck him. "Stop them!"

"Steady on, boy, steady on," said Mr. Harkness in an even, cool tone.

"And we without a spavined cayuse to follow 'em!" raged one of the cow-punchers.

As he spoke, the three tormentors of the ranch party topped the little rise.

As they did so, Clark Jennings rose in his stirrups and faced back.

"Ye-ow!" he yelled defiantly, waving his hat mockingly toward them.

Bang!

The sombrero was suddenly whirled out of the youth's hand as if some invisible grasp had been laid upon it.

Blinky looked apologetically at Mr. Harkness, and then carefully blew the smoke from the barrel of his pistol, the weapon with which he had just punctured Clark's headgear.

"Awful sorry, boss," he said contritely, "but I just plumb couldn't help it."

"Well, I don't know that I blame you," said Mr. Harkness, as the Clark Jennings party vanished in a hurry.

The encounter with the three ne'er-do-wells had, however, changed the rancher's plans. Deducing from the fact that Hank Handcraft had Rob's hat in his possession, that the boy must have escaped from the Indians in some miraculous way, it was concluded that it would be a mere waste of effort to pursue the Moquis. The search must now be made for Rob himself. Even Tubby's spirits were dashed by the disturbing occurrences of the last few hours, and he and Merritt were both silent as the party made its way back to the cliff where the ponies had been left the day before. The plan now was to mount and scatter through the range.

"We'll run a fine-tooth comb through it," was the emphatic way Mr. Harkness put it, "and if we don't find the boy, it'll be because he isn't on the top of the earth."

All that day they retraced their steps, and at night made camp not far from the entrance to the tunnel. They did not dare to proceed in the dark, for fear of once more losing their path, and even more valuable time. It was not a lively party that settled down in the evening glow for a hastily cooked and not over-abundant supper. Even Tubby seemed distracted and worried.

Suddenly Merritt, who was walking up and down, trying to evolve some theory to fit the facts in Rob's case, gave a shout and pointed over to the southwest.

"Look, look!" he shouted. "Off there – what is it?"

The boy's keen eyes had espied a thin spiral of blue smoke ascending from a hilltop against the burnished gold of the sunset.

"A signal fire!" announced Blinky, after an interval.

"It may be Rob signaling for help!" exclaimed Merritt, as the smoke rose and vanished and rose and vanished at regular intervals.

"No, it ain't him. The Boy Scouts use the Morse, don't they?"

"Yes. What has that to do with it?"

"Well, this is Injun code."

"Indian?"

"Sure. The Injuns have as distinct a smoke-signal code as we have a wireless system. It works just as good, too, from what I can hear. Now, if we had their code book we – "

"What, the Indians have a code book?"

"You bet."

"Where?"

"In their rascally heads, son, where it's safe," rejoined the cow-puncher.

"Hullo, look! There's an answer," cried Tubby, suddenly pointing to another hilltop some distance from the first.

Another thin column of smoke was rolling upward from it in evident answer to the first.

"Those fellows are making a date," decided the rough-and-ready Blinky. "I'd like to be on hand when they keep it, and maybe we'd find out something about Rob."

CHAPTER XVII.

IN THE CLUTCHES OF THE GRIZZLY

Blinky's conviction that the signaling had something to do with Rob would have been strengthened if he could have been so stationed as to watch the making of the first smoke telegraph Merritt noticed. On the distant hilltop Clark Jennings, Hank Handcraft and Bill Bender were stooped over a fire of green wood, alternately covering and uncovering it with a horse blanket. The signaling was being done under Clark's direction, as neither of the Easterners knew anything about the Indian smoke language. Clark, during his long residence in the West, had picked up his knowledge of it from Emilio Auguardo, the halfbreed who had once worked on his father's ranch. Through this man, too, he had become quite an intimate of the Moquis, as we have seen.

"Douse it! Uncover it. Douse. Uncover. Douse. Uncover."

Clark Jennings's commands came in regular rotation, with differing intervals between each order. In all essentials, those three enemies of the boys were using a telegraph code antedating by centuries the system in use to-day on our telegraph lines.

"Ought to be getting an answer soon," muttered Clark, shading his eyes with his hand and standing erect on an upraised slab of rock, the better to command a view of the distant hills in the section in which he had reason to believe the Moquis had proceeded.

"Hold on! Douse that fire!" he cried suddenly.

Against the sky, not more than five miles distant, an answering thread of smoke had unrolled, like the coils of a slow serpent. Up it wavered and then stopped abruptly, to be followed by another puff. It was as if a locomotive lay beyond the distant hill. The puffs of smoke resembled the vaporous belchings of an engine stack when it is starting up.

"They say for us to wait here and they will send a messenger," announced Clark finally.

"Well, I guess we can wait as well as anything else," rejoined Hank Handcraft, extending himself lazily on the sun-warmed ground. "Are they going to send a pony?"

"Don't know," rejoined Clark shortly. "Wonder what we'll do if Harkness hits our trail?"

"Don't bother about that. He'll be too busy rounding up that boy Rob," replied Bill Bender. "Queer where that kid went to."

"Queer is no word for it," agreed Clark; "and what bothers me is that we are likely to have trouble with him yet if we're not careful."

"You think he is alive, then?"

"Must be, unless he melted into thin air."

"That's so."

"By the way, Clark," struck in Hank Handcraft suddenly, after a period of deep thought, aided by the consumption of sweet grass stalks, "wouldn't the present time be a good one to drop in on Harkness's mavericks?"

"By thunder! you're right," was the reply. "Harkness is pretty sure to have the whole ranch force, or every one he can spare, spread out, seeking for that young cub. The Far Pasture will be pretty sure to be left unguarded. You're right, Hank; we'll see what the chief has to say, and then, if we can get a few Indians to help us, we'll make the big drive. Ha, ha! won't Harkness be sore if he finds the boy, to discover that it's cost him the loss of a few thousand dollars' worth of beef!"

In further discussion of their plans the three worthies spent the next hour or so. By that time it was dark, and the thin, silver nail-paring of the new moon showed above the eastern hilltops. It grew very still, the deep silence being broken only by the hoot of an owl or the chirping of some night insect.

Suddenly, and quite near at hand, a twig snapped loudly. Instantly the hands of each of the three flew to their weapons, but an instant later they perceived that they, at least, had no cause for alarm from the newcomer who had thus announced his arrival. It was an Indian that stood before them while they still stared in a startled way into the dark shadows.

"Chief Black Cloud!" exclaimed Clark, as the figure silently glided into the small circle, shrouded in the folds of a heavy blanket.

The chief had tied his pony some distance away, and had advanced with customary stealth on the camping place of his allies.

"How!" grunted the chief, squatting down on his haunches. "You want talk?"

"Well, that's the reason we lighted up our little wireless plant," grinned Hank.

"Hum! My brother with the hair on his face is foolish," snapped the chief, while the others laughed aloud at Hank's discomfiture. He did not again adopt a flippant tone toward the impressive figure which sat in council with them.

"Chief Black Cloud," began Clark, "in the Far Pasture of Harkness, the rancher, below the places of the dwellers in the cliff, are many young cattle. They are unbranded, and if we can cut them out and get them away we can all be rich – make heap money."

"Um!" grunted the chief, waiting for what was to come.

"Harkness and his men are all away, seeking for a lost boy – "

"Hum! Black Cloud know," interpolated the Indian.

"Then you did take him off!" burst out Bill Bender. "Why didn't you have sense enough to keep him?"

"Hush!" ordered Clark sharply. He was sufficiently conversant with Indian character to know that the chief might be mortally offended by adverse comments on anything his tribe might have seen fit to do. But Black Cloud paid no attention to the interruption.

"What you want Moquis to do?" inquired the chief, going right to the heart of the matter, for he had quite acumen enough to reason that from the conciliatory tone Clark adopted he had some service to ask.

"That you will help us on the cattle drive," rejoined Clark boldly.

The Indian shook his head.

"No can do," he said decisively. "Mayberry, the Indian agent, is in the mountains seeking us now."

Here the chief permitted himself a grim smile.

"But Mayberry kind man. If we go back to reservation, make no trouble, everything all right. All the same as before. But if we steal the cattle of the white men, then the white man visit us with his anger."

"It will be easy and no chance of being found out," urged Clark.

But the chief shook his head.

"No. My people here for snake dance. Not for steal white man's cattle."

"Then you won't help us?"

"No."

"You'll be sorry for it, you old idiot!" snapped out Clark, foolishly letting his temper get the better of him for an instant.

The Indian drew himself up with haughty dignity. Slowly he gathered the folds of his blanket about him. Then, and not till then, did he speak.

"Black Cloud is never sorry for his deeds. But perhaps white men will sorrow for theirs," he said, with extraordinary dignity and force, and the next instant he was gone.

"Say, Clark, it seems to me you've put your foot in it," muttered Hank, as the offended Indian strode off.

"He looked Black Cloud by nature, as well as by name," commented Bill Bender. "He glared at you as if he would read your thoughts, Clark."

"I hope not," laughed the young ranchman, though with a rather uneasy note in his assumed carelessness, "for they had a lot to do with him, I can tell you."

"What do you mean?"

"That we'll have to do the Indian act again."

"How do you mean?"

"Why, steal the cattle, disguised as Moquis. But come on, hit the trail. We'll be getting back to the ranch. I'll tell you as we go."

As my readers will have seen, the above conversation throws a strange side light on Indian morality. The Moquis, of whom Chief Black Cloud was patriarch, had had not the slightest objection to "hold up" the boys and to capture Rob for ransom, but at the seriously punishable crime of cattle stealing they balked. What the consequences of this decision were to be to Clark Jennings and his companions we shall see later on. At the Jennings ranch they met Jess Randell, and here the four sat late, discussing the big coup which they hoped was to retrieve all their fortunes. At length they arrived at a decision, and arranged a plan which they deemed offered every security against discovery.

It is now time to revert to the fortunes of Rob, of whom we last heard when the three worthies into whose camp he had been catapulted with such velocity were searching in vain for a clew to his whereabouts. As will be recalled, after leaping on the back of Hank Handcraft's pony, the boy had dashed off down the trail at top speed, without a very clear idea of where he was bound for. As he rode he heard the sounds of the pursuit, and simultaneously with the sharp report of Bill Bender's gun, he felt his pony halt and stagger beneath him.

For an instant of time it seemed to Rob as if he was bound to be captured by his pursuers, but in his extremity his mind worked with the lightning-like rapidity common to quick intelligences in moments of great stress.

At the precise instant that his little mount gave a groan and plunged forward into the dust of the trail, Rob reached above his head and seized the low-hanging branch of a small, stout tree. With the activity of the practiced athlete, he swung himself up into the thick greenery as the poor pony lay in its death struggles below. Rapidly working his way among the branches, he was soon several feet from the trail.

While Bill Bender and Clark Jennings were hanging over the dead pony and searching in vain for the boy's trail, Rob was noiselessly making his way over rocks and stones down into a deep-timbered gully. He could hardly keep himself from an exultant laugh as he pictured the chagrin and amazement of his old enemies at his total disappearance.

He rapidly sped on, and after an hour or more of traveling, feeling himself safe once more, he halted. Up to that moment he had pressed on without feeling much fatigue. The excitement of the rapid happenings since he had slipped upon the Indian pony's back had sustained him. Now, however, that he felt comparatively safe, the inevitable relapse came. Rob's knees began to feel strained and weak, as they had never felt before. His head, too, buzzed queerly, and a feeling of overpowering lassitude assailed him in every limb.

"Good gracious! am I going to play out?"

The boy asked himself the question with every feeling of dismay.

He was in a solitary, remote part of even those wild mountains, and although he was on a small eminence, he could see nothing at any point of the compass but dreary, monotonous woods or rocky patches of sun-burned wild oats and foxtail. By the height of the sun and its direction, he guessed that it was about noon, and that he had been traveling in a southerly direction, but even of this, in his sudden collapse, he had no very clear notion. All he really knew was that he craved food with a wild, aching longing in his every fibre that had never before assailed him.

"I wonder if starving men in cities ever feel like this?" the boy asked himself. "Woof! I could eat a horse raw cheerfully."

Then came an interval of utter lassitude of mind and body, in which the boy lay stretched out on the hot ground, without a thought of anything. A strange ringing began to sound in his ears and his head felt dizzy.

"Got to get out of the sun," he thought in a dim, remote sort of way.

He voiced his thought aloud, and his tones sounded faint and far away to him, like the accents of another person.

"Brace up, Rob, brace up," he began repeating to himself, as he made for a patch of deep shadow under a bush covered with a kind of purple berry.

But in spite of his determination to "brace up," even the slight effort of crawling to the grateful shade bothered him so badly that, having reached it, he could only lie on his side and pant like an exhausted creature.

All at once a sound was borne to his ears that made him sit up erect – the bright light of hope gleaming in his eyes.

Heavy footsteps were coming toward him. The boy cared little whether the advancing individual was friend or foe. His coming meant food, at least; for surely no enemy could be so inhuman as to refuse nourishment to a boy in the pitiable condition of Rob Blake.

"There's something queer about those footsteps, though," mused the boy, as the sounds drew nearer, accompanied by a sort of low, growling grumbling.

What can it be?

"Sounds like – like – Great Scott! Silver Tip!"

Into the small clearing on one side of which Rob lay beneath his sheltering bush, there had suddenly lumbered the half-legendary monarch of the Santa Catapinas.

It was Silver Tip, the giant grizzly! For a second the monster's small, piglike eyes glared in blank astonishment at the encounter. He was hunting honey, and this sudden meeting with a white boy in the wildest part of his own particular domain evidently had struck him "in a heap," so to speak.

The next instant, however, the expression of his wicked little optics changed to one of active malevolence. He swung his great bulk savagely about – like the giant heavings and swayings of a picketed elephant. The small spot of snow-white hair that gave him his name shone out on his dark, shaggy hide like a bull's-eye. It was right over his heart. If Rob had had a rifle, he could have pierced it as unerringly as a target.

But the lad was weaponless, and almost unconscious from fatigue and exhaustion. Indeed, delirium had been dangerously near when Silver Tip came lumbering into the clearing. The sight of the monster had tipped the delicately adjusted balance.

With a crazy yell, the boy leaped to his feet and rushed straight at his monstrous shaggy opponent. In sheer astonishment, Silver Tip reared his immense bulk upward.

"Ha, ha! I'll kill you, you old thief, you old murderer!" yelled Rob deliriously, as he hurled his slight form straight against the monstrous hairy tower of rugged strength.

The great forepaws – armed with claws as sharp and heavy as chilled-steel chisels – extended. In another instant the lad would have been in the monster's death grip, when an intervention, as sudden as it was unexpected, occurred.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE INDIAN AGENT

From the dense surrounding clumps of chaparral there had suddenly emerged the figure of a tall, bearded man, with keen blue eyes and a striking air of self-reliance and resolution. It was Mr. Mayberry, the Indian agent. Over his arm he carried an automatic rifle, which he instantly jerked to his shoulder as his amazed eyes fell on the extraordinary scene before him. Surely Jeffries Mayberry was the first man who had ever gazed upon the spectacle of a boy, unarmed and alone, attacking the hugest grizzly in that part of the country.

"The boy is mad!" was his first thought, and, as we know, he was not far wrong in this surmise.

But it was no time for speculation as to the causes of this strange scene, and Jeffries Mayberry was not the man to indulge in rumination when the necessity called for immediate action.

Bang!

For the twentieth – or was it the hundredth? – time in his eventful life, Silver Tip felt the impingement of a bullet. But with the monster's usual good fortune, the ball did not pierce a vital part. Instead, it buried itself in the fleshy part of the brute's forequarters, inflicting a wound that made him bellow with pain and face round on this new foe.

As Silver Tip, in regal majesty, swung his huge form about, Rob crumpled up in a heap and lay senseless on the hot ground.