Kitabı oku: «The Border Boys with the Mexican Rangers», sayfa 3
CHAPTER VI
AN EXCITING QUEST
In the meantime, the keenest anxiety prevailed in the camp. After awaiting breakfast for a long time, it was at last eaten and the tin dishes scoured, without there being any sign of the missing boy.
“We must organize a search at once,” declared the professor. “Following on the top of that warning last night, it begins to look ominous.”
“Maybe he has lost himself, and will find his way back before long,” suggested Ralph hopefully.
Coyote Pete gloomily shook his head.
“Jack Merrill ain’t that kind,” he said; “I tell yer, I don’t like the looks of it.”
“Why not fire guns so that if he is in the vicinity he can hear them?” was Walt Phelps’ suggestion.
“Yep, and bring the whole hornets’ nest down on our ears, provided they are anywhar near,” grunted Coyote Pete. “No younker, we will have to think up a better way than that.”
“Would not the search party I suggested be the best plan?” put in the professor.
“Reckon it would,” agreed Coyote Pete; “what you kain’t find, look fur, – as the flea said to ther monkey.”
But nobody laughed, as they usually did, at Pete’s quaintly phrased observations. There was too much anxiety felt by them all over Jack’s unexplained absence.
“Shall we take the horses?” inquired Walt.
“Sartin, sure,” was the cow-puncher’s rejoinder, “don’t want ter leave ’em here for that letter writer and his pals to gobble up.”
So the stock was saddled and the pack burros loaded and “diamond hitched,” and the mournful and anxious little party got under way. It so chanced that their way led them to the little hill where Jack had stopped on the stolen horse and listened for sounds of the pursuit. Coyote’s sharp eyes at once spied the tracks, but naturally he could make nothing of them.
Suddenly Ralph Stetson, who had ridden a little in advance, gave a startled cry.
“Come here, all!” he shouted.
“What’s up now?” grunted Coyote Pete, spurring forward, followed by the others.
“Why, here’s a horse, – a dead horse, shot through the head, lying here,” was the unexpected reply.
“Well, Mr. Coyote, what do you make of it?” asked the professor, after Pete had carefully surveyed the ground in the vicinity.
“Dunno what ter make uv it yit,” snorted Pete. “Looks like ther’s something back of this, as the cat said when she looked in the mirror, and – wow!”
“What is it?” they chorused as they pressed about the spot where Coyote was pointing downward, an unusual expression of excitement on his ordinarily unemotional features.
“See that?” he demanded.
“Yes, I see several footsteps,” said the professor, “but what have they – ”
“Ter do with it? Everything. Them’s Jack Merrill’s footmarks or I lose my guess. And see here, this little wavy line, – a lariat’s dragged here. Oh, the varmints!”
“How do you construe all this?” asked the professor.
“Easy enuff. Them rascals, whoever they be, hev roped Jack, hog-tied him and dragged him off.”
“O-oh!”
The exclamation, half a groan, burst from all their throats. Examining the ground further, it seemed likely that Coyote’s construction of the case was a correct one. All of which goes to show how very far wrong a theory can go.
“Let’s hurry after them, whoever they are, and put up a fight,” cried Ralph.
“Yes, we must rescue Jack,” echoed Walt Phelps.
“Now, hold your broncs, youngsters,” warned Coyote, “in the fust place we dunno how many of them there be, and in the second we dunno jus’ whar they air. Am I right?”
“Indeed, yes,” said the professor. “Boys, you should not be so impetuous. Julius Caesar, when he – ”
“Dunno the gent,” struck in Pete, “but my advice is to kind of hunt around this vicinity and maybe we’ll find some more clews. Go easy, now, boys, and make as little noise as possible.”
A few moments later the ashes of the camp fire near which Jack had so suddenly alighted were found, but of the outlaws no trace remained. As a matter of fact, Ramon’s shouts had attracted them, and as soon as they had rescued him the camp had been abandoned in a hurry. It did not suit Ramon just then to try conclusions with the Border Boys.
“Wall, here’s whar they camped,” muttered Coyote Pete, “we certainly had some close neighbors last night.”
The boys examined the camp site with interest, while the professor and Coyote Pete conversed earnestly apart. At the conclusion of their confab, Coyote Pete spoke.
“It’s up to us to go forward, boys,” he said. “Ain’t no use lingering ’bout these diggin’s.”
“But mayn’t the bad men have turned back down the canyon?” asked Ralph.
Coyote shook his head.
“Think agin, son,” he admonished, “the floor of the gulch is too narrow for ’em to hev got by us without our knowing it.”
“That’s so,” said Walt, while Ralph colored up a bit. He didn’t like to be looked upon as a tenderfoot.
It was some time later that they reached the volcanic-looking stretch of country into the pitfalls of which Jack had fallen.
“Ugh! What a dreary place!” stammered Walt, a bit apprehensively.
Somehow they all felt the oppressive gloom in the same way. It depressed and made them silent. When they spoke at all it was in hushed tones, like folks use in church or a big museum. This is the effect of most awe-inspiring scenery, be it beautiful and grand, or merely gloomy and threatening.
“In past ages volcanic energy was at work here,” said the professor, gazing about with interest; “the formation of yonder cliffs tells an interesting story to the scientist. I wish my geological hammer was not in the packs, and I could get some specimens of the rocks. They would be excessively interesting.”
“Not half so interesting ter me as a peek at Jack Merrill,” grunted Pete. “I wish your science was capable of finding that lad for us, professor.”
“Indeed, I wish so, too,” sighed the professor, “but that is outside the realm of science. She can tell you of the past but is silent as to the future.”
“I wonder if there are any volcanoes ’round about here now?” asked Ralph, looking about rather apprehensively.
“No, indeed, the fires are long extinct,” declared the professor, “this valley was formed at a remote period when no doubt hot water geysers and fires spouted through the earth’s crust. But that will never occur again. In fact – ”
“Look! Look there!” shouted Walt, suddenly pointing off to one side of the valley.
“By Jee-hos-o-phat – smoke!” yelled Pete, fairly startled out of his usual composure.
“A volcano!” cried Walt “Hadn’t we better be getting away from here?”
“This is most extraordinary,” exclaimed the man of science, “there is every evidence here that the internal fires have been long extinct and yet, as if to confound us, smoke comes pouring from that fissure yonder.”
“Wall, my vote is that we git right out of hyar quick,” declared Pete, “volcanoes and Peter de Peyster never did agree.”
But the professor, filled with scientific ardor, was already spurring his bony animal across the scarred and arid plain toward the smoke.
The others, watching him, saw him approach the fissure carefully and dismount. The next instant he uttered a yell that startled them all.
“Hez ther fireworks started?” asked Coyote anxiously.
The professor was waving his bony arms around like one of those wooden figures that you see on barns. He was evidently in a state of great excitement.
“What’s that he’s shouting?” asked Walt. “Hark!”
“Boys! boys! I’ve found him – Jack!”
This was the cry that galvanized them all into action. Without seeking for explanations, in fact, without a word, they spurred toward the professor’s side. They found him peering down into the fissure, the edge of which was concealed by grass and ferns. Craning their necks, they, too, could spy a figure in the depths of the crevasse.
“Jack! Jack, old boy! Are you all right?” they cried anxiously.
“Bright and fair!” came up the cheery answer, “but almost dead. I thought you’d never come. Got anything to eat?”
“Anything your little heart desires,” Walt assured him.
In the meantime Pete had been busy getting a lariat in trim to lower to the beleaguered boy. Presently it was ready, and after much hauling and struggling, they got their companion once more to the surface. Jack reeled for an instant as he gained the brink, but Ralph’s arms caught him. The next minute he had recovered his self-possession, however, and after eating ravenously of such provisions as could be got together hastily, he related the story of the strange things that had happened to him since leaving camp that morning.
“If I hadn’t thought of those matches in my pocket and of igniting a fire of that dried grass, I doubt if I’d have been here now,” he concluded.
“I think you are right,” said the professor gravely, “I am glad that that fire at least was not extinct.”
CHAPTER VII
THE CLOUDBURST
Our adventurers, after a council of war, decided to press right on. As Coyote Pete put it:
“We’ve got a plumb duty ter perform and we’ll see the game through, if it’s agreeable to all present.”
It was, and after Jack had fully recovered, which, aided by his natural buoyancy, did not take as long as might have been expected, the start was made.
“It’s a race for the Trembling Mountain, now,” cried Jack, as he once more bestrode brave little Firewater.
“So it is,” cried Walt Phelps.
“And may the best man win,” struck in Ralph rather pointlessly, as Pete reminded him.
“There’s only one bunch of best men on this trip,” he said, “and they’re all with this party.”
It did not take long to leave the dreary volcanic valley behind them, and they soon emerged on a rolling plain covered with plumed grasses of a rich bluish-green hue, on the further margin of which there hung like dim blue clouds, a range of mountains.
“There is our goal,” cried the professor, with what was for him a dramatic gesture. He waved his arm in the direction of the distant hills.
“Yip-yip-y-e-e-e!” exploded the boys, in a regular cowboy yell.
“A race to that hummock yonder!” shouted Jack.
The others needed no urging. After their rough journey among the mountains the ponies, too, seemed to enter into the pleasure of traversing this broad open savannah.
Off they dashed, hoofs a-rattling and dust a-flying. But it was Firewater’s race from the start. The lithe little pony easily distanced the others, and Jack, laughing and panting, drew rein at the goal a good ten seconds before the others tore up with quirts and spurs going furiously. Jack decided it was a dead heat between Walt and Ralph, and both declared themselves satisfied.
As the sun dropped lower, and hung like a red ball above the distant mountains, the question of finding a suitable camping place became an urgent one. Finally, however, on reaching the dried-up bed of a river, Coyote Pete decided that they had reached the proper spot.
“What about water?” inquired Walt rather anxiously.
“Plenty of that,” said Pete, sententiously.
They looked about at the dry sand and rocks in the river bed and at the waving grass on either hand.
“You must have splendid eyesight,” laughed Ralph, “I don’t see a drop, unless it’s in those clouds ’way off there above the mountains.”
“I, too, must confess that I’m puzzled,” put in the professor. “A more arid spot I have rarely seen.”
“Wall, I’ll guarantee that if you dig down a few feet right hyar you’ll get all the water you want,” said Coyote Pete calmly.
“Soon proved,” cried Ralph, and aided by Walt he unpacked one of the burros and the two lads selected long-handled shovels.
How the dirt did fly then! Maybe it was an accident, and then again maybe it wasn’t, when the professor, deeply immersed in a book he carried in his pocket, found himself the center of a regular gravel storm. He hastily moved out of the radius of the energetic diggers. But presently a loud cry from them announced a discovery.
“Struck oil?” asked Jack.
“Better still, – water!”
Sure enough, from the steep sides of the big holes they had dug, water was beginning to ooze. It was brownish in hue, alkaline in taste and distinctly warm, but still it was water, and men, boys and beasts drank eagerly of it.
But it ran in very slowly, and, as Jack observed, it was a long time between drinks.
“Wish some of that rain off in the mountains would strike hereabouts,” observed Walt, as they sat down to supper.
“How do you know it’s raining off there?” asked Ralph belligerently.
“I can see the dark clouds, Mister Smarty, and also, I have observed the fact that lightning is flashing among them.”
“Hear the thunder, too, I suppose?” asked Ralph sardonically.
“Might if my ears were as big as yours,” parried Walt.
Immediate hostilities were averted by the professor, who said:
“Boys! boys! Let us change the subject.”
“The ears, you mean,” muttered Walt, but he didn’t say it out loud, and the meal passed off merrily after the little passage-at-arms. As it grew dark, they could see the lightning flashes in the far distance quite distinctly. It had a weird effect, this sudden coming and departure of blue flares on the horizon. Against the radiance the serrated outlines of the mountains stood out as if they had been cut from cardboard.
“Going to set a watch to-night?” asked Ralph, as they sat about a fire formed of the tough fibrous roots of the tufted grass, which was really more of a shrub.
“Of course,” rejoined Coyote, “we don’t know whether them varmints of Ramon’s is ahead or ahind, but wherever they are, if we don’t watch out, they’ll do us all the mischief they can.”
“Reckon that’s right,” agreed Ralph, “there’s one good thing, though, they can’t very well creep up on us here.”
“No, that’s one advantage of an open camp,” agreed Jack, “on the other hand, though, we might have a job defending ourselves if attacked.”
More discussion, none of which would be of vital interest to record here, followed. But it did not last long. Thoroughly tired out as our adventurers were, they one by one sought their blankets and the camp was soon wrapped in silence. That is, if the snores of some of the members of the party be excepted. But Coyote, who was on watch, was not bothered with sensitive nerves, and the noise disturbed him not a whit.
It was about midnight, and time for the plainsman to call Jack and Ralph to relieve him on guard, when a most peculiar sound arrested him in the act of crossing to the sleeping lads’ sides.
The noise which had attracted his attention was a most unusual, an almost awe-inspiring one. Coming from no definite quarter, it yet filled the air with an omnipresent rumbling and roaring, not unlike, – so it flashed into Coyote’s mind, – the reverberating rumble of an express train.
“But they ain’t no night mails crossing this savannah as I ever heard on,” he thought.
“Jumping bob cats!” he fairly howled the next instant.
In two bounds he reached the sleepers’ sides and fairly shouted and shook them into wakefulness.
“What is it, Indians?” cried Jack, springing erect.
“Another bear!” gasped the professor.
“It ain’t neither. It’s worser th’n both!” was Coyote’s alarming, if oddly expressed, rejoinder.
As he spoke the roaring became louder, closer, more ominous.
Through the darkness they could now see that rushing toward them down the dry river bed was a mighty line of white. In the very indefiniteness of its form there was something that gripped them all with a cold chill of alarm, the keener for its very lack of understanding of the nature of the approaching mass. Ralph snatched up a rifle, but Coyote, seizing his arm, checked him in a flash.
“Don’t do that, son. It’s not a mite of good,” he cried, and then the next instant: —
“Run for your lives, everybody! Thar’s bin a cloudburst in ther mountains, and here comes ther gosh darndest flood since Noah’s!”
CHAPTER VIII
ADRIFT ON THE DESERT
The consternation which Coyote’s words caused may be imagined. The Border Boys hastily snatched up what they could, and with Professor Wintergreen sprinting beside them, they dashed off, making for the higher ground off to the right of their camping place. Behind them came the wall of white, angry water, uplifting its snowy crest gleamingly through the darkness.
But suddenly Jack stopped short.
“Here, take these,” he exclaimed, thrusting his rifle and blankets into Ralph’s hands.
Before the other could reply Jack was off into the night, sprinting away as he had not done since the field meet at Stonefell, when he won that memorable two hundred yard dash. The lad had suddenly recollected, and bitterly censured himself for it, too, that in the first flash of panic he had entirely forgotten to turn their stock loose. Tethered as they were, the animals would be drowned and the party helpless, unless the creatures were set free to swim for their lives, or gallop off before the flood.
Fortunately, it was not far, as the animals were staked out some distance below the camp and in the general direction in which the active lads had been fleeing.
As he ran, Jack felt for and found his knife, a big-bladed, heavily-handled affair. Reaching the ponies’ sides, he hastily slashed, with heavy sweeps of his stout blade, one after another of the tethers. The animals, super-sensitive to approaching danger, were already wildly excited, and as their halter lines parted one after another, they dashed off madly.
The last animal for Jack to reach was Firewater. But the pony, instead of dashing off like the others, nuzzled close to Jack, shivering and sweating in an extremity of terror. Do what he could, Jack could not get him to move. All at once the boy threw a quick glance behind as a rapid footstep sounded.
“Coyote!” he cried.
“Yep, Jack, it’s that same dern fool,” cried the cow-puncher, “I see you had brains enough to do what I orter done afore we started on the run.”
“No time to talk about that now,” exclaimed Jack. “Look behind you.”
“Gee whillakers, boy, the flood’s upon us!”
Jack’s reply was to spring upon Firewater’s back.
“Here, Pete! Up behind me, quick!”
“Go on, Jack, and get away; I’ll take my chances.”
“Not much you won’t! Get up quick, now!”
The lad extended a foot. Pete rested his weight on it for a flash and the next instant was mounted behind Jack.
“Yip-ee-ee-ee!” shrilled the boy, driving home his heels into the pony’s flanks.
Firewater, balky no longer, gave a mad leap forward. Behind them roared the oncoming flood.
“Make for the high ground!” shouted Pete, “it’s our only chance.”
Jack made no reply, but bent lower over Firewater’s withers, urging the gallant little pony on. But suddenly their flight was checked. And that, too, just as they had reached the comparative safety of the higher ground on the banks of the dry water course which had become so suddenly converted into a menace.
Firewater stuck his foot into a pocket-gopher hole. He struggled bravely to maintain his footing, but what with the heavy load he was carrying and the speed at which he had been suddenly halted, the pony lost his equilibrium. The next instant Jack and Coyote were on the ground while Firewater, thoroughly scared now, dashed off, whinnying wildly in his terror.
Pete, too, was up in a flash, but Jack lay quite still. The force of the fall had stunned him. The cow-puncher caught him up in a jiffy and set off clumsily, running from the menace behind with the unconscious boy in his arms.
But like most men whose lives have been spent in the saddle in our great west, Pete was an indifferent runner. Then, too, his heavy leather “chaps,” which he had not removed while on watch, hampered him.
Before he had run ten yards the onrush of water was upon him and his senseless burden. The irresistible force of the flood swept him from his feet in a flash and bore him on its swirling surface like a chip or a straw. But half stunned, choked and dazed as he was, the cow-puncher clung to Jack. How long he could have continued to do so is doubtful, and this story might have had a far different termination. But something that occurred just at that instant deprived Pete of further responsibility in the matter.
Something struck him a sudden blow in the back of the head and a thousand lights instantly surged and danced before his eyes. As he lost consciousness, Pete felt himself seized by what appeared to be a mass of rough arms or tentacles, and lifted bodily from his feet. Then everything faded from his senses.
When he recovered it was broad daylight and Jack was bending over him. Sick and weak as the rugged cow-puncher felt as his senses rushed back like an arrested tide, he could not forbear smiling as he gazed at the lad.
Jack’s costume was, to say the least, an airy one. It consisted in fact, of part of his night clothing, badly torn, and a pair of boots which he had just had time to put on in the hurried retreat from the camp.
The boy saw the smile and guessed its reason. But the smile was speedily replaced by a more serious expression as Pete sat up and at once sought to have explained to him just what had happened.
“Something that felt like one of them octopusses you read about, gripped me, and that’s about all I can recall,” he said; “what came next?”
“I hardly know much more about that than you,” was Jack’s response, “except that when I recovered my senses after that spill that Firewater gave us I found myself half drowned, all tangled up in the roots of a big tree that the flood was hurrying along. Feeling about me the first thing I discovered was you, and I can tell you I was mighty glad, too, Pete, old boy. No, don’t glare at me. I know, – or can guess, – that it was you who saved my life after Firewater threw us both off and – ”
“No more of that, youngster,” snorted Pete sternly, although his eyes were filled with an odd moisture. “I reckon it was the old tree yonder that saved us both. We were both struggling in the flood when it hit me and put me to sleep for a while. It’s a good thing it came on roots first or we might not have bin so chipper this partic’lar A. M.”
They both regarded the tree to which they probably owed their lives. A big stick of timber of the pine variety, and evidently of mountain growth, it lay a short distance from them just as the flood had left it stranded. For the cloudburst over, the water had sunk in the dry river bed as rapidly as it had arisen. Hardly a foot of muddy liquid now remained in the river to show the aftermath of the wild watercourse of the night.
“But now, what has become of the others?” exclaimed Jack anxiously. “I hope they are all right.”
“I guess so, son,” said Pete, rising rather weakly to his feet, for the blow the tree had struck him, while it had not broken the skin, had been a stunning one.
“You see,” he went on, “they got a good start of us and should have reached the high ground afore the water hit.”
“That’s so,” agreed Jack, “and I can see now that the water did not rise so very high. It was its speed and anger that made it terrible.”
“Wonder how far that blamed old tree carried us,” said Pete, rather anxiously. “It’s just curred to me that if we don’t connect with the stock and some grub pretty quick, we’ll be in a bad fix.”
He gazed about him as he spoke. On every side stretched monotonous plains covered with the same gray-green brush as the savannah amidst which they had camped the night before. But the question in Pete’s mind was whether or not it was the same plain or another altogether on which they stood.
But fortunately for them, for they were not in the mood or condition to stand hardship long, they were not destined to remain long in doubt as to the whereabouts of their companions. While they were gazing anxiously into the distance Jack’s keen eye suddenly detected a sharp flash off to the eastward. It was as if the sun had glinted for an instant on a bit of sharply cut diamond. The flash was as bright as a sudden ray of fire. The next instant it was seen no more. But a second later it flashed up again. This time the glitter was to be seen for a longer interval.
“What on airth is it?” gasped Pete, to whom Jack had indicated the phenomenon.
“Wait one moment and maybe I can tell you if it is what I hope,” cried Jack in an excited tone. With burning eyes he watched the distant point of light flashing and twinkling like a vanishing and reappearing star.
“Hooray!” he cried suddenly, “it’s all right! It’s Ralph and the rest and they are all safe. But they don’t know yet where we are.”
Pete gazed at the boy as if he suspected that the stress of the night might have turned his mind.
“Anything else you kin see off thar?” he asked sardonically.
“Nothing but that they say the horses are all right, and that if we see their signals we are to send up a smoke column,” replied Jack calmly, his countenance all aglow.
“Look hyar, Jack Merrill, I promised your father ter take care of yer,” said Pete sternly, “an’ I don’t want ter take back a raving loonertick to him. What’s all this mean?”
“That Ralph is signalling with a bit of mirror, – heliographing, they call it in the army,” cried Jack, with a merry laugh, which rather discomfited Pete.
“Wall, that may be, too,” he admitted grudgingly, “thar sun would catch it and make it flash. But how under ther etarnal stars kin you tell what he’s saying?”
“Simple enough,” rejoined Jack; “he was making the flashes long and short, – using the Morse telegraph code, in fact. You know we had a cadet corps at Stonefell to which we both belonged. Field signalling and heliographing was part of our camping instruction, but I guess neither of us ever dreamed it would come in handy in such a way as this. That certainly was a bully idea of Ralph’s. He knew if we were any place around we would see the flashes and be able to read them, whereas we couldn’t have sighted them in the tall brush so easily and might have missed them altogether.”
“Wall, what air we goin’ ter do now?” asked Pete, rather apathetically.
“Do? Why, light a fire, of course. Then they’ll see the smoke column and come over to us with grub and the ponies.”
“Hum,” snorted Pete. “Got any matches?”
“Why, no. Haven’t you?”
“Nary a one.”
“Phew!” whistled Jack. “Now we are in a fix for certain. What can we do?”
“Keep your shirt – or what’s left of it – on, son, you’ll need it,” said Pete slowly, a smile overspreading his sun-bronzed features, “thar’s more ways of killing cats than choking ’em ter death with superfine cream. Likewise thar’s more ways of lighting a fire than by using parlor matches.”
Jack watched Pete wonderingly as he took out his knife in silence and strode off to the tree. He found a dead branch and whittling off the wet outside bark soon reached the dry interior. This done, he cut the wood down to a stick about two feet long and a little thicker than a stout lead pencil. Then he hacked away at some more of the dry wood till he had a small flat bit of thoroughly dry timber. In this he excavated a small hole to fit the point of the pencil-like stick.
“Now git me some dry twigs from that brush yonder,” he directed Jack, who had been gazing on these preparations with much interest and a dawning perception of what the old plainsman was going to do.
By the time Jack was back with the twigs, – the dryest he could find, – Pete had scraped off a lot of sawdust-like whittlings and piled them about the hole he had dug out. Then taking the pencil-like stick between his palms, he inserted its lower end in the hole, carefully heaped the sawdust stuff about it, and began rotating it slowly at first and then fast.
All at once a smell of burning wood permeated the air. From the sawdust a tiny puff of blue smoke rolled up. Suddenly it broke into flame.
“Now the twigs! Quick!” cried Pete, and as Jack gave him the dry bits of stick he piled them on the blazing punk-wood, blowing cautiously at the flame. In ten minutes he had a roaring fire. But the old plainsman’s work wasn’t finished yet. He began hacking green branches from the tree and piling them on top of his blaze.
Instantly a pillar of dun-colored, smoke, thick and greasy, rolled upward into the still air.
Pete took off his leather coat and threw it over the smoking pyre, smothering the column of vapor.
“Now then, son,” he said, with the faintest trace of triumph in his voice, “yer see that this here hell-io-what-you-may-call ’em, ain’t ther only trick in the plainsman’s bag. By raising and lowering that coat you kin talk in your Remorse thing as long as you like.”
“Pete, I take off my hat to you,” exclaimed Jack, feeling ashamed of the rather superior manner he had assumed when talking of the heliograph a while before.
“That’s all right, son. But take it frum yer Uncle Dudley that we none of us know everything. Thar’s things you kin larn from an Injun, jus’ as I larned how ter git that fire a-goin’.”
Kneeling by the smoldering smoke-pile, Jack raised and lowered the coat at long and short intervals, forming a species of smoke telegraphy easily readable by anyone who understood the Morse code.
An hour of anxious waiting followed and then upon the scene galloped at top speed the rest of the adventurers bearing with them some food, scanty but welcome, and best of all, the ponies and one rifle.
