The Border Boys with the Mexican Rangers. Goldfrap John Henry
himself he must, or face death in that gloomy place. Without any definite idea in his mind, Jack struck off along the bottom of the abyss, which was overgrown with a short, coarse sort of grass of a pallid green color.
As he moved along his progress was suddenly arrested. His foot had encountered something that wriggled and squirmed horribly under his sole. It was a sickening sensation, this, of feeling that squirmy mass under his foot.
Jack stepped hastily back. As he did so something brown and mottled slid off through the grass, hissing angrily. As it went there came a dry sort of sound, like the rattling of peas in a bladder. At the same time a nauseating musky odor filled the air.
“This place may be alive with rattlers!” thought Jack, glancing nervously about him.
As he spoke he thought that from a dark corner at the further end of the rocky pit he could hear a sort of scuffling and rustling, unpleasantly suggestive of intertwined masses of scaly bodies writhing and contorting in snaky knots. At any rate, he decided to explore the rift no further in that direction. Instead, he turned back and sitting down on a projecting bit of rock, – after first carefully reviewing the surroundings, – Jack set himself to some hard thinking.
If only he had possessed a rifle or a revolver, – or even a knife, – his situation would have been different. By firing the weapons he might have attracted attention to his dilemma, and with the knife it might have been feasible to cut steps in the walls at some other part of the crevasse.
Then, too, there is something in the mere feel of the good wood and steel of a rifle that gives a fellow confidence and courage. It seems like a friend or at least a protector. But poor Jack had none of this comfort He was trapped in the bowels of the earth with only his bare hands to aid him out of his difficulties.
As it was unthinkable to dream of exploring the pit further in the direction in which he felt sure lay the den of snakes, Jack finally decided on striking off the other way. That he went carefully, you may be sure. He did not want again to experience that wriggly, crawly feeling under his foot.
The crevasse seemed to be of considerable length. In fact, he estimated that he had walked some half mile or more before he reached what seemed to be its confines. It ended abruptly in a steep wall of rock, and with its termination Jack’s hopes of escape vanished also. Fairly unnerved, the boy sank down on a heap of dried fern and buried his face in his hands.
Was he to be buried alive in this horrible place?
Then he fell to shouting. He yelled and hulloed till his throat was dry and sore, and his lips cracked. He knew that he ran considerable risk of attracting the attention of the outlaws, but in his present predicament he didn’t much care what happened so long as he got out of the terrible place. But all his shouting came to naught, and after an interval of waiting Jack realized that it had all been in vain.
What was he to do next? Nothing but to wait for rescue or – But Jack would not allow himself to complete the sentence.
“While there is life there is hope,” he murmured to himself, and involuntarily recalled the night when he had stood upon the tower of the old mission, a hundred feet above the ground, and deemed that his end had come. Yet he had escaped from that dilemma, and more impossible things had happened than that he should get out of his present scrape alive.
All at once, while he sat thus meditating, the boy spied, not far above his head and only a short distance away, a dangling vine some two inches in circumference, and seemingly tough and fibrous.
“It ought to bear my weight,” thought Jack, “and if only it will, I’ll get out of this hideous place yet.”
He began making brave efforts to reach the trailing tendon. Time and again, with hands that were cut and bleeding from the rough surface of the rock, he was compelled to desist in his efforts, but at last, mustering his waning strength, he made a mighty leap. His fingers closed on the vine and he drew himself upward. But as the boy’s full weight came upon the green trailer it snapped abruptly, and Jack was thrown violently to the ground.
He fell with such force that he was stunned and helpless. Clasping the broken bit of treacherous vine in his hands, the Border Boy lay on the floor of the crevasse, senseless.
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