“WARMING UP.”
“Ho, hum!” yawned Owen Clancy, stirring drowsily in his chair on the
veranda of the Ophir House, “this is certainly the easy life. Trouble
is, fellows, it’s too darned easy. About all the exercise we get is when
we mosey out to the athletic club and boot the pigskin around. I’m
getting sluggish.”
“Come over and slug me,” Billy Ballard invited, from the other end of
the veranda. “Feeling kind of sluggish myself, Red, and if you’re pining
for exercise, here’s your chance.”
“Tush, tush!” scoffed the red-headed chap. “Taking a fall out of you,
Pink, wouldn’t be exercise, but a walk-away. Everything’s too deuced
humdrum around here to suit me. Say, Chip, can’t you mix us up something
with real snap and ginger in it? Nothing has happened for a week--not
since Ballard and I got back the bullion that had been stolen from the
Ophir Mine. That livened up things a whole lot.”
Young Merriwell looked up from the paper he was reading.
“Ten yards in four downs,” he remarked absently. “The new football rules
this year will bring a revival of the old smashing line drives of the
past. I wish we’d got this news before Ophir played the Gold Hillers.”
Merry showed a disposition to become absorbed once more in the article
he was reading. Clancy headed him off.
“Bother the new rules! I asked you if you couldn’t fix up a little
excitement for us, Chip. Life in southern Arizona is becoming flat,
stale, and unprofitable. Every morning the prof makes us grind to the
limit; every afternoon we loaf around until four, and then go out to the
club field and punt, tackle the dummy, or fall on the ball. It’s getting
mo-no-to-nious.”
“I guess the climate is playing hob with you, Clan,” grinned Merry,
throwing aside the paper. “Early December, and here we are in our shirt
sleeves, loafing in the shade and trying to be comfortable. But buck up.
It won’t last forever. It won’t be long now before we’ll be pulling up
stakes and hiking toward the ice and snow.”
“What’re we waiting for?”
“The prof’s mining deal is hanging fire. Almost any mail from the East
may bring the letter that winds it up.”
“Then I wish things would warm up while the deal is being wound up.”
“That’s always the trouble with a chap that’s got brick-red hair,”
complained Ballard. “He’s a volcano, and can’t be happy unless he has a
violent eruption every fifteen minutes.”
“I’ve got a notion,” scowled Clancy, “to imitate an earthquake and shake
you off the porch.”
“Go on and shake,” urged Ballard, chuckling. “I’d like to get a strangle
hold on an earthquake just once and make it behave.”
With a whoop the red-headed chap projected himself out of his chair and
in the direction of his chum. But he never reached Ballard’s end of the
porch. Merry put out a foot and neatly tripped him.
“Here, now!” protested Clancy, slamming into a porch post and grabbing
it in his arms to keep from going down. “Who invited you to take a hand
in this, Chip? Maybe you want me to roll you off the porch before I do
business with Pink?”
“Spell ‘able,’” said Merry, squaring around in his chair.
“Too hot,” answered Clancy, after a moment’s reflection.
“Oh, slush!” muttered Ballard disgustedly. “It’s too hot now, but a
moment ago he was anxious to have things warm up. He’s bluffing, that’s
all.”
Clancy took no notice of the good-natured gibe, but crossed the veranda
to a thermometer that hung beside the hotel door.
“Only seventy-five,” he announced, then reached for the newspaper Merry
had dropped and tore off a piece of it. “It ought to be more than that,”
he added.
Taking a match from his pocket he fired the scrap of paper and held it
close to the bulb of the thermometer.
“What’s that for?” demanded Ballard.
“Warming things up,” answered Clancy. “Beginning with the thermometer.
Gee, look at the mercury climb! Eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five----”
“Here!” interposed Merry. “Don’t you know that’s the town’s official
thermometer? You might as well tinker with the weather bureau, Clan.
Everybody in Ophir swears by that instrument.”
“I’ll have ’em swearing at it before long,” was Clancy’s calm rejoinder.
“A hundred and fifteen,” he added, as he dropped the charred paper.
“That’s going _some_.”
Just as he was backing away from the thermometer, Woo Sing, the Chinese
roustabout, came blandly out on the veranda. He looked cool and
comfortable in his roomy silk kimono.
“Velly fine day, Missul Melly,” he grinned.
“Pretty hot, Sing,” answered Merry, pretending to mop his face with a
handkerchief.
“You callee hot?” demurred Woo Sing. “Goodness glacious! Me allee samee
cool as cucumber.”
He took a slant in the direction of the thermometer, gave it a casual
glance, then jumped and brought his eyes closer to the top of the column
of mercury.
“Gee Klismus!” he gasped, and the sweat began to start out on his
parchmentlike face. “Him plenty hot--hot as blazes. My gettee fan befo’
my gettee sunstluck!”
With that he slumped weakly back into the hotel, peeling off his kimono
as he went.
“That proves,” said Merry, joining in with the laughter of his chums,
“that this climate business is about two-thirds imagination.”
“Sh-h!” whispered Clancy, “here comes the prof. He looks about as warm
as a hundred and fifty pounds of ice. Let’s see what effect the
thermometer has on _him_.”
Merry pulled his shirt open at the throat, fell back in his chair, and
began mopping his face. Ballard leaned over the veranda rail and gasped
like a spent fish. Clancy was also panting, seemingly in the last stages
of exhaustion.
Professor Phineas Borrodaile had a book in his hand, one finger between
the leaves to mark his place. He was bareheaded, and was evidently
coming out to sit in the shade and read comfortably.
“Well, well, young gentlemen,” he murmured, coming to a startled halt as
his eyes rested on the boys, “you act as though you were overcome with
the heat. Why, I had not noticed that the weather was at all
uncomfortable. It seems to me very pleasant, ve-ry pleasant.”
“Look--at the thermometer!” gasped Merry huskily, smothering his face in
his handkerchief.
The professor walked over to the instrument and studied it. Another
moment and he was tremendously excited.
“What is this?” he cried. “A--a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit?
_Mirabile dictu!_ There must be something wrong with the thermometer.”
In spite of the professor’s guess that there was something wrong, the
perspiration began to bead his brow. Taking his book under one arm, he
allowed a hand to grope for a handkerchief in the tail pocket of his
long black coat.
“Who says there’s anything wrong with that there thermometer?” growled a
voice. “Why, the hull town gits its temperature from that machine!
Whenever it says the weather’s so and so, you can gamble your spurs
that’s what it is.”
Pophagan, proprietor of the hotel, shoved out upon the veranda.
“But look, Mr. Pophagan,” quavered the professor, dabbing at his bald
head with his handkerchief and beginning to loosen his collar. “It’s one
hundred and ten--_in the shade!_”
“That’s right,” whispered Pophagan faintly, staring at the instrument.
“Sufferin’ sinners, but it’s hot. Hadn’t noticed it before. Hottest
early December I ever seen in Ophir.”
“There are some new spots on the sun,” remarked the professor,
unbuttoning his vest and fanning himself with his book, “and they always
have the effect of disarranging the seasons. Mercy! I feel as though I
was suffocating.”
Pophagan threw off his hat and jerked off his coat.
“It come on sudden,” he panted. “I’m allers subject to heat spells like
this. Purty nigh got done up oncet with a sunstroke in the Harqua
Halas.”
“Merriwell,” queried the professor, in alarm, “you are not light-headed,
are you? You don’t feel as though you were going to succumb to this
excess of solar caloric?”
Merry, handkerchief over his face, was squirming in his chair.
“I’m all right, professor,” he answered, in a smothered voice.
Clancy stood at the end of the porch, leaning against the wall of the
hotel with his back to the professor and Pophagan. His shoulders were
heaving convulsively.
Ballard continued to lean over the rail, keeping his face averted and
doing his best to stifle his laughter.
“Better go into the hotel, young gentlemen,” suggested the professor,
“and get some fans. I’m going. I feel as though I was being
incinerated.”
“Me, too,” chimed in Pophagan. “If this gits much worse, we’ll all be
burnin’ up. Can’t remember a time like this since the summer o’
ninety-six. You could fry eggs in the sun that year. Rattlesnakes an’
coyotes got grilled in the desert afore they could hunt their holes.
There was a drummer stoppin’ with me then, an’ he wore a celluloid
collar. He went out to sell a bill o’ goods an’ the collar exploded.
Pair o’ rubber boots I had melted into a chunk. Whoosh!”
Pophagan, closely followed by the professor, melted into the hotel. The
youngsters on the porch pulled themselves together, exchanged glances,
and went into another spasm of laughter.
“Got to keep this going,” sputtered Clancy, lighting another piece of
paper and fanning it back and forth around the bulb of the thermometer.
“This is the most fun I’ve had since Pop and Woo Sing went hunting
cats.”
“We’ll have the whole town fried to a frazzle,” hiccuped Ballard. “I
never thought a thermometer made the weather before, but this seems to
prove it.”
“You don’t have to do that, boys, to get things warmed up,” remarked
some one, with a laugh, from the foot of the veranda steps. “I’m
bringing you a proposition that will do more to warm things up than all
the overheated thermometers in Arizona.”
All the lads whirled to give their attention to the man who had just
spoken.
“Colonel Hawtrey!” exclaimed Merriwell.