style="font-size:15px;"> “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.”
