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.”

“The ears, you mean,” muttered Walt, but he didn’t say it out loud, and the meal passed off merrily after the little passage-at-arms. As it grew dark, they could see the lightning flashes in the far distance quite distinctly. It had a weird effect, this sudden coming and departure of blue flares on the horizon. Against the radiance the serrated outlines of the mountains stood out as if they had been cut from cardboard.

“Going to set a watch to-night?” asked Ralph, as they sat about a fire formed of the tough fibrous roots of the tufted grass, which was really more of a shrub.

“Of course,” rejoined Coyote, “we don’t know whether them varmints of Ramon’s is ahead or ahind, but wherever they are, if we don’t watch out, they’ll do us all the mischief they can.”

“Reckon that’s right,” agreed Ralph, “there’s one good thing, though, they can’t very well creep up on us here.”

“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!”