AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.
“Keep these scrappers apart, Pink, you and Darrel,” said Merry, moving
over to Clancy’s side. “If that ball is only thirty feet away, Clan,”
he added to his red-headed chum, “we’ll be able to get it, all right.”
“I don’d pay for nodding,” puffed the enraged Fritz. “Dot greaser
feller kicked him ofer, und you vill take der money oudt oof der pay
vat comes py him.”
“_Diablo!_” snapped Silva. “Dat Dutchmans get de ball from de camp—I no
get him. Take dat dinero out of me, and I quit _muy pronto_.”
“You peen some pad eggs,” wheezed Fritz, “und I preak your face in!”
“Yah, yah, yah!” taunted the Mexican. “You not able to break de face
in.”
Ballard and Darrel, enjoying the situation more than they cared to show
before Fritz and Silva, clung to the two would-be sluggers and held
them apart. Merriwell, on his knees at the rim of the cañon, turned to
look around at the Dutch boy and the Mexican.
“Cut out this fighting,” said he sternly. “The one that strikes the
first blow will have the five dollars taken out of his pay. Keep hands
off of each other and neither of you will have to pay a cent if the
ball is lost. Understand that, Fritz? And you, Silva?”
The warlike ardor of the two was appreciably lessened. Fritz ceased his
floundering struggles to get at the Mexican, and Silva suddenly grew
docile. Merry’s threat was a master stroke.
“Let them go, fellows,” went on Merry, smothering a desire to laugh.
“You and Silva go back to camp, Fritz, and if you’re not peaceable,
just remember that your pay will be docked. And hereafter leave our
athletic equipment alone. I don’t object to your doing a little
training—in fact, I think it would be a good thing for each of you—but
when you go at it again you’d better have an instructor. I’ll be glad
to put you through a course of sprouts any time you feel the need of
it.”
Without indulging in any remarks, Fritz and Silva started off in the
direction of the mesa and the camp. They did not travel in company but
straggled along at a distance from each other. As soon as they were out
of sight, Ballard turned around with a laugh.
“That five-dollar play of yours, Chip,” said he, “was a winner. Fritz
is a tightwad, and Silva pinches a dollar till he makes the eagle
squeal. They’ll be peaceable for a while, take it from me.”
“How about the ball, Chip?” inquired Darrel, hastening to join the two
on the edge of the cañon wall.
“There it is,” Merry answered, pointing downward.
The wall was a sheer drop, and the ball could be seen lying on a narrow
shelf at least thirty feet below. A small bowlder lay near the edge of
the shelf, and the oval had been caught between that and the clifflike
wall from which the shelf projected. Below the shelf was another fall
of thirty or forty feet to the bottom of the cañon.
“How the mischief do you suppose the ball happened to lodge there?”
inquired Clancy. “If it had been kicked over the cliff, I should think
it would have fallen too far out to hit the shelf.”
“Probably,” Merriwell suggested, “it just rolled over the rim and
dropped straight down. Anyhow, there it is, and it’s up to us to get
it.”
Darrel straightened on his knees and looked around him at the lay of
the land adjacent to the brink.
“It’s easy enough to get the ball, fellows,” said he. “There’s a
paloverde, just back of us, growing in the edge of that clump of
greasewood. We can splice a couple of reatas, hitch one end to the
paloverde, and I can shin down and be back with the ball in no time.”
“Where’ll we get the reatas?” returned Clancy. “I’ve got one, but it’s
a scant thirty feet long. Fritz—darn him!—cut off a piece of it the
other day to use for something or other.”
“As far as that goes,” put in Merry, “I guess we could pick up an extra
piece of rope around the camp. But maybe we won’t have to try this
reata business. Get some sticks and let’s see if we can’t dislodge the
ball and knock it into the bottom of the cañon.”
They gathered pieces of dried timber and rained them down on the shelf.
Several clubs reached the ball, but the bowlder held it firmly.
“No earthly use,” said Ballard. “The pigskin is wedged there as though
it was in a vise.”
“Thou art so near, and yet so far!” hummed Clancy, staring down at the
ball. “I wonder,” he continued, “if we couldn’t come up from below? The
cliff doesn’t seem so steep under the shelf.”
“I was thinking of that, Clan,” Merry answered.
“It won’t take me more than half an hour to scare up that reata and an
extra piece of rope,” said Darrel. “I reckon the spliced ropes are our
best bet, Chip.”
Merry had been taking stock of the cliff face above the shelf. Wind and
weather had worn it smooth and slippery, and there was not a projection
in the whole thirty feet from the brink to the shelf which a climber
could use in getting back to the top of the wall.
“Strikes me,” said Merry, “it’s a difficult job, not to say dangerous.
How are you on the climb, Darrel?”
“Well,” he admitted, “I can throw a rope a heap better than I can climb
one, but I’ll gamble my spurs I can come over that thirty feet of wall
without much trouble.”
“It’s as smooth as glass,” remarked Ballard. “All your weight would be
on your arms from the moment you left the shelf—you couldn’t use your
feet at all.”
“My arms would stand it.”
“Suppose you had the ball under one arm, Curly?” Clancy queried.
“What’s the matter with kicking the ball into the cañon?” returned
Darrel. “I wouldn’t have to tote it back.”
“That’s right, too,” said Clancy.
“Before we try the rope trick, Darrel,” spoke up Merry, rising to his
feet, “we’ll go back to camp; come down the cañon and see if the wall
under the shelf can’t be scaled.”
“It can’t,” asserted Darrel, with conviction. “I can see enough of it
from here to make me sure of that.”
“We’ll look over the ground from below, anyhow,” said Merriwell. “Come
on, fellows; there’s no use hanging around here.”
“Wait a minute, Chip,” called Ballard, who was still standing at the
cañon’s brink. “There’s a man on a horse coming up the gulch. Wonder if
he’s bound for Tinaja Wells? I wouldn’t swear to it, but I’ve a notion
the rider is Colonel Hawtrey.”
At this Darrel whirled with a muttered exclamation and peered down at
the white streak of trail angling back and forth among the trees and
masses of bowlders. The horseman was proceeding slowly northward, his
head bowed in deep thought. In a few moments he would be abreast of
the lads on the top of the wall, and almost under the shelf.
“It _is_ the colonel!” muttered Darrel, in an odd, strained voice. “Why
do you suppose he’s riding this way? I’ll take my solemn Alfred he’s
bound for our camp.”
“Don’t be too sure of it, old man,” said Merriwell. “He pulled out with
the Gold Hillers early this morning to see them safely settled in a
camp of their own. That bunch went south, didn’t they? Well, it stands
to reason that the colonel has to come this way in order to get back to
Gold Hill.”
“No, Chip,” disagreed Darrel, “the colonel’s easiest course to
Gold Hill from below Tinaja Wells would be by the other trail from
Dolliver’s. He’s got business at our camp, and that’s the reason he’s
coming this way. Maybe,” and Darrel’s face filled with foreboding,
“what he’s got in mind has something to do with me.”
“Don’t be in a taking about it, Darrel,” Merriwell answered, laying
a hand on his new chum’s shoulder. “It’s a cinch that anything the
colonel may have in his mind can’t hurt you. If he’s going to be a
visitor, we’d better go down and see what he wants.”
Without delaying further, the boys started on their return to camp. In
spite of Merriwell’s reassuring words, however, the troubled look did
not leave Darrel’s face.