The Border Boys with the Mexican Rangers

“No, that’s one advantage of an open camp,” agreed Jack, “on the other hand, though, we might have a job defending ourselves if attacked.”

More discussion, none of which would be of vital interest to record here, followed. But it did not last long. Thoroughly tired out as our adventurers were, they one by one sought their blankets and the camp was soon wrapped in silence. That is, if the snores of some of the members of the party be excepted. But Coyote, who was on watch, was not bothered with sensitive nerves, and the noise disturbed him not a whit.

It was about midnight, and time for the plainsman to call Jack and Ralph to relieve him on guard, when a most peculiar sound arrested him in the act of crossing to the sleeping lads’ sides.

The noise which had attracted his attention was a most unusual, an almost awe-inspiring one. Coming from no definite quarter, it yet filled the air with an omnipresent rumbling and roaring, not unlike, – so it flashed into Coyote’s mind, – the reverberating rumble of an express train.

“But they ain’t no night mails crossing this savannah as I ever heard on,” he thought.

“Jumping bob cats!” he fairly howled the next instant.

In two bounds he reached the sleepers’ sides and fairly shouted and shook them into wakefulness.

“What is it, Indians?” cried Jack, springing erect.

“Another bear!” gasped the professor.

“It ain’t neither. It’s worser th’n both!” was Coyote’s alarming, if oddly expressed, rejoinder.

As he spoke the roaring became louder, closer, more ominous.

Through the darkness they could now see that rushing toward them down the dry river bed was a mighty line of white. In the very indefiniteness of its form there was something that gripped them all with a cold chill of alarm, the keener for its very lack of understanding of the nature of the approaching mass. Ralph snatched up a rifle, but Coyote, seizing his arm, checked him in a flash.

“Don’t do that, son. It’s not a mite of good,” he cried, and then the next instant: —

“Run for your lives, everybody! Thar’s bin a cloudburst in ther mountains, and here comes ther gosh darndest flood since Noah’s!”

CHAPTER VIII

ADRIFT ON THE DESERT

The consternation which Coyote’s words caused may be imagined. The Border Boys hastily snatched up what they could, and with Professor Wintergreen sprinting beside them, they dashed off, making for the higher ground off to the right of their camping place. Behind them came the wall of white, angry water, uplifting its snowy crest gleamingly through the darkness.

But suddenly Jack stopped short.

“Here, take these,” he exclaimed, thrusting his rifle and blankets into Ralph’s hands.

Before the other could reply Jack was off into the night, sprinting away as he had not done since the field meet at Stonefell, when he won that memorable two hundred yard dash. The lad had suddenly recollected, and bitterly censured himself for it, too, that in the first flash of panic he had entirely forgotten to turn their stock loose. Tethered as they were, the animals would be drowned and the party helpless, unless the creatures were set free to swim for their lives, or gallop off before the flood.

Fortunately, it was not far, as the animals were staked out some distance below the camp and in the general direction in which the active lads had been fleeing.

As he ran, Jack felt for and found his knife, a big-bladed, heavily-handled affair. Reaching the ponies’ sides, he hastily slashed, with heavy sweeps of his stout blade, one after another of the tethers. The animals, super-sensitive to approaching danger, were already wildly excited, and as their halter lines parted one after another, they dashed off madly.

The last animal for Jack to reach was Firewater. But the pony, instead of dashing off like the others, nuzzled close to Jack, shivering and sweating in an extremity of terror. Do what he could, Jack could not get him to move. All at once the boy threw a quick glance behind as a rapid footstep sounded.

“Coyote!” he cried.

“Yep, Jack, it’s that same dern fool,” cried the cow-puncher, “I see you had brains enough to do what I orter done afore we started on the run.”

“No time to talk about that now,” exclaimed Jack. “Look behind you.”

“Gee whillakers, boy, the flood’s upon us!”

Jack’s reply was to spring upon Firewater’s back.

“Here, Pete! Up behind me, quick!”

“Go on, Jack, and get away; I’ll take my chances.”

“Not much you won’t! Get up quick, now!”

The lad extended a foot. Pete rested his weight on it for a flash and the next instant was mounted behind Jack.

“Yip-ee-ee-ee!” shrilled the boy, driving home his heels into the pony’s flanks.

Firewater, balky no longer, gave a mad leap forward. Behind them roared the oncoming flood.

“Make for the high ground!” shouted Pete, “it’s our only chance.”

Jack made no reply, but bent lower over Firewater’s withers, urging the gallant little pony on. But suddenly their flight was checked. And that, too, just as they had reached the comparative safety of the higher ground on the banks of the dry water course which had become so suddenly converted into a menace.

Firewater stuck his foot into a pocket-gopher hole. He struggled bravely to maintain his footing, but what with the heavy load he was carrying and the speed at which he had been suddenly halted, the pony lost his equilibrium. The next instant Jack and Coyote were on the ground while Firewater, thoroughly scared now, dashed off, whinnying wildly in his terror.

Pete, too, was up in a flash, but Jack lay quite still. The force of the fall had stunned him. The cow-puncher caught him up in a jiffy and set off clumsily, running from the menace behind with the unconscious boy in his arms.

But like most men whose lives have been spent in the saddle in our great west, Pete was an indifferent runner. Then, too, his heavy leather “chaps,” which he had not removed while on watch, hampered him.

Before he had run ten yards the onrush of water was upon him and his senseless burden. The irresistible force of the flood swept him from his feet in a flash and bore him on its swirling surface like a chip or a straw. But half stunned, choked and dazed as he was, the cow-puncher clung to Jack. How long he could have continued to do so is doubtful, and this story might have had a far different termination. But something that occurred just at that instant deprived Pete of further responsibility in the matter.

Something struck him a sudden blow in the back of the head and a thousand lights instantly surged and danced before his eyes. As he lost consciousness, Pete felt himself seized by what appeared to be a mass of rough arms or tentacles, and lifted bodily from his feet. Then everything faded from his senses.

When he recovered it was broad daylight and Jack was bending over him. Sick and weak as the rugged cow-puncher felt as his senses rushed back like an arrested tide, he could not forbear smiling as he gazed at the lad.

Jack’s costume was, to say the least, an airy one. It consisted in fact, of part of his night clothing, badly torn, and a pair of boots which he had just had time to put on in the hurried retreat from the camp.

The boy saw the smile and guessed its reason. But the smile was speedily replaced by a more serious expression as Pete sat up and at once sought to have explained to him just what had happened.

“Something that felt like one of them octopusses you read about, gripped me, and that’s about all I can recall,” he said; “what came next?”

“I hardly know much more about that than you,” was Jack’s response, “except that when I recovered my senses after that spill that Firewater gave us I found myself half drowned, all tangled up in the roots of a big tree that the flood was hurrying along. Feeling about me the first thing I discovered was you, and I can tell you I was mighty glad, too, Pete, old boy. No, don’t glare at me. I know, – or can guess, – that it was you who saved my life after Firewater threw us both off and – ”

“No more of that, youngster,” snorted Pete sternly, although his eyes were filled with an odd moisture. “I reckon it was the old tree yonder that saved us both. We were both struggling in the flood when it hit me and put me to sleep for a while. It’s a good thing it came on roots first or we might not have bin so chipper this partic’lar A. M.”

They both regarded the tree to which they probably owed their lives. A big stick of timber of the pine variety, and evidently of mountain growth, it lay a short distance from them just as the flood had left it stranded. For the cloudburst over, the water had sunk in the dry river bed as rapidly as it had arisen. Hardly a foot of muddy liquid now remained in the river to show the aftermath of the wild watercourse of the night.

“But now, what has become of the others?” exclaimed Jack anxiously. “I hope they are all right.”

“I guess so, son,” said Pete, rising rather weakly to his feet, for the blow the tree had struck him, while it had not broken the skin, had been a stunning one.