A STRANGER IN CAMP.
Frank Merriwell, junior, and his two chums, Owen Clancy and Billy
Ballard, were camping at Tinaja Wells with the football squad of the
Ophir Athletic Club. Besides Frank and his friends there were fifteen
campers in the grove at the Wells, enumerated by Ballard as one
professor, one Mexican, one Dutchman, and twelve knights of the pigskin.
The professor was Phineas Borrodaile. He hailed originally from a prep
school in the middle West, had come to Arizona for his health, and,
aided by the two Merriwells, senior and junior, had found wealth as
well. The professor was now being retained as instructor by young Frank
and his chums, thus enabling them to keep up with their studies while
“roughing it” in the Southwest.
The Mexican was Silva, the packer. Silva had a burro train, and had
packed the equipment of the campers over the fifteen miles separating
Ophir from Tinaja Wells. For ten miles the trail was a good wagon road;
but from Dolliver’s, at the mouth of Mohave Cañon, up the cañon to
Tinaja Wells, the trail was a mere bridle path, and only pack animals
could get over it. Hence the lads had found it necessary to make use of
Silva and his burros.
The Mexican had hired out as cook, as well as packer; but two days
of Silva’s red-hot Mexican cooking, with garlic trimmings, made it
necessary for the boys either to line themselves with asbestos or get
another cook. Clancy was sent in to Ophir and he came back with Fritz
Gesundheit, the Dutchman. Fritz had presided over a chuck shanty in the
cattle country, and carried recommendations which highly extolled his
sour-dough bread, flap jacks, and crullers.
Fritz was nearly as broad as he was high, but he proved a chef of rare
attainments. He would roll around between the stove and the chuck tent,
and play an errorless game in his cooking and serving; but let him
waddle out of his culinary environment and he was as full of blunders
as a porcupine is of quills. For a lot of skylarking boys, he was an
everlasting joy and a perpetual delight.
Silva resented the loss of his cooking job. He burned to revenge
himself on the fat _gringo chingado_ who had kicked the red peppers
and the garlic out of camp and preëmpted the culinary department. Less
than an hour after Fritz had evolved his first meal for the campers and
covered himself with glory, the Mexican’s dark plots came to a head.
Placing the professor’s mule, Uncle Sam, between two clumps of cholla
cactus, he smilingly invited Fritz to take a ride.
“Carrots,” as Fritz had instantly been christened by the lads on
account of his hair, accepted the invitation and climbed to Uncle Sam’s
hurricane deck. Thereupon the vengeful Silva twisted Uncle Sam’s tail
with direful results. Carrots made a froglike leap over the mule’s head
into one clump of cactus, and Silva, caught by the mule’s heels before
he could get out of the way, sat down in another clump.
The campers were not long in finding out that Carrots was the subject
of weird hallucinations. His latest delusion concerned buried treasure.
It cropped out in the afternoon of his second day in camp. Merry
had taken the football players out for a “breather”—down the cañon
to Dolliver’s, and back. Silva was out with a shovel and hornspoon,
somewhere in the hills, hunting a placer, and incidentally nursing his
grievances. The professor was reading in the shade of a cottonwood. In
the shade of another cottonwood, Carrots was mooning over a pipe of
tobacco.
“Brofessor,” called the Dutchman, knocking the ashes out of his
pipe and putting it carefully away in his pocket, “vill you told me
someding?”
The professor looked up from his book and over his spectacles at Fritz.
“What is it that you desire to know?” he asked.
“Ask me dot.”
The professor showed signs of impatience.
“Simpleton! Am I not putting the query? What shall I tell you?”
“Py chiminy Grismus! Oof I know vat you vas to told me, for vy should I
make der rekvest for informations?”
Borrodaile gave a grunt of disgust and hunted the shade of another
cottonwood. Fritz was persistent, however, and followed him up.
“I hat a tream mit meinselluf der oder night, brofessor,” continued
Fritz, coming up from behind, “und you bed my life it vas der keveerest
tream vat I know. Iss treams someding or nodding? Tell me dot, oof you
blease. Ballard, he say it iss; aber you know more as anypody, so tell
me, iss it?”
“Go away,” said the professor severely; “you annoy me.”
“I peen annoyed like anyding mit dot tream,” went on Fritz, not in the
least disturbed by the professor’s ill humor. “Dis iss der vay I ged
it: Fairst, I valk along der moonlight in, mit der dark around, und I
see a shtone mit a gross on der top. Yah, so hellup me, I see him so
blain as nodding; und I pull oop dot shtone, und I tig, and vat you
dink?”
“I am not interested at all in your foolish delusions!” came tartly
from the professor. “If you have business anywhere else, do not let me
detain you a moment.”
“Make some guesses aboudt dot!” persisted Fritz. “Vat you dink is der
shtone under mit der gross on, hey? Shpeak it oudt.”
The professor, goaded to desperation, merely glared.
“Py shinks!” cried Fritz, “I findt me so mooch goldt dot shtone under
mit der gross on dot I cannot carry him avay!” He leaned down and
whispered huskily, his eyes wide with excitement: “Puried dreasure it
vas, brofessor, so hellup me! Come, blease, und hellup me look for der
shtone mit der gross on. Ven I findt me der dreasure, I gif you haluf.”
With an explosion of anger, the professor leaped to his feet, flung
his book at Fritz, and dove head-first into a tent. Fritz turned away
wonderingly.
“Vat a foolishness,” he muttered, “for der brofessor to gif oop haluf
der dreasure like dot! Vell, I go look for der goldt meinselluf, und
ven I findt him, I haf him all.”
Now, Fritz might have walked his legs off looking for a stone “mit a
gross on,” had not Silva grown tired of hunting a placer and returned
suddenly to the Wells. He saw Fritz in close converse with the
professor, crept to a point within earshot, and listened. Creeping
away as silently as he had approached, he showed his teeth in a smile
of savage cunning as he pulled a half-burned stick from the smoldering
fire and dogged the Dutchman down the gulch.
Apparently there was not a doubt in the mind of Fritz but that he would
find what he was looking for. With a shovel over his shoulder, he
puffed, and wheezed, and stumbled along the trail, eying the rocks on
each side of him and singing as he went.
Silva, chuckling with unholy glee, made a detour from the trail and
got back into it ahead of Fritz; and then, with the burned stick, he
marked a rough cross on one of the bowlders and retired behind a screen
of mesquite bushes to enjoy the sight of his fat enemy, working and
sweating to such little purpose.
When Fritz saw that marked rock, he let go a howl of delight and
triumph that echoed far down the cañon. It reached the ears of Merry
and his friends, who, in their running clothes, were strung out in a
long line on their way back from Dolliver’s.
The lads halted, bunched together, and made up their minds that the
noise they had heard should be investigated. Proceeding cautiously
forward, they peered around a ridge of bowlders and saw Fritz digging
into the hard ground like mad. So feverishly did the fat Dutchman work
that one could hardly see him for the cloud of sand and gravel he kept
in the air.
Not more than ten feet away from the sweating Fritz was the Mexican,
Silva. He was in a flutter of delight.
“What the deuce is going on, Chip?” inquired Clancy.
“I can tell you, Clan,” spoke up Ballard, stifling a laugh. “Fritz had
a dream last night that he found a rock with a cross on it, and that he
rolled away the rock, dug up the ground, and found more gold than he
could carry. He told me about it. I’ll bet a farm he thinks he’s found
the rock. Silva’s in on the deal somewhere, although Carrots doesn’t
know it.”
“This is rich!” gulped Hannibal Bradlaugh, shaking with the fun of it.
“Say, Chip, can’t you ring in a little twist to the situation and turn
the tables on the greaser?”
“Throw your voice, Chip!” suggested Clan. “Make Carrots think he’s
digging up more than he bargained for. Go on!”
“All right,” laughed Merry. “Let’s see what happens.”
The boys, caught at once with the idea, suppressed their delight, and
peered over the top and sides of the ridge. Suddenly a nerve-wracking
groan was heard, and seemingly it came from the depths of the shallow
hole in which Fritz was working. The Dutchman paused in his labor,
mopped the sweat from his face, and looked around.
“Vat iss dot?” he puffed. “Vat I hear all at vonce? Who shpoke mit me?”
Again Merry caused a hair-raising groan to come from the hole. A yell
of fear escaped Fritz. Dropping his shovel, he pawed out of the hole,
and got behind a rock a dozen feet away. From this point of vantage he
stared cautiously back at the hole and, his voice shaking with fear,
inquired:
“Who shpoke mit me? Vat it iss, blease? I don’d hear nodding like dot
in der tream, py chiminy grickeds!”
“How dare you disturb my bones, looking for treasure?” came a hollow
voice from the ragged opening in the earth. “I am the big Indian chief,
Hoop-en-de-doo, and I will haunt you and take your scalp! I shall call
all my braves from the happy hunting grounds, and we will dance the
medicine and go on the war trail; we will——”
Merry was interrupted by a wild shriek that went clattering up and down
the gulch in terrifying echoes. Fritz was not the author of it, for he
seemed stricken dumb and rooted to the ground. It was the Mexican who
had given vent to the blood-curdling cry. Frightened out of his wits,
Silva, still emitting yell after yell, bounded like a deer for the
trail and the home camp.
Fritz did not see Silva, but the fierce howling, coming nearer and
nearer, must have given him the idea that Chief Hoop-en-de-doo and all
his shadowy band of warriors were after him. Fritz awoke to feverish
activity in less than a second. He whirled, and, with remarkable speed
considering his size, scrambled for Tinaja Wells. Silva chased him
clear to the camp, where Fritz, utterly exhausted, dropped in a heap
and rolled into the chuck tent. The Mexican vanished into some other
spot that he considered safe.
When the boys, roaring with laughter, finally reached the grove, they
were met by the professor and a young fellow with blue eyes and light,
curling hair. There was a stranger in camp, it seemed, and Merry and
his companions smothered their merriment to give Borrodaile a chance to
free his mind.
“Merriwell,” said the professor, “this hilarity is most untimely. This
young gentleman, I fear, will think you are a lot of hoodlums. Allow me
to present Mr. Ellis Darrel, who has just arrived from Gold Hill and is
earnestly in search of information respecting the Gold Hill Athletic
Club. Darrel, Frank Merriwell, junior.”
Darrel was smiling. There was something about him which, at the very
first glance, appealed to Merry. The two shook hands cordially.