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.

“You see,” he went on, “they got a good start of us and should have reached the high ground afore the water hit.”

“That’s so,” agreed Jack, “and I can see now that the water did not rise so very high. It was its speed and anger that made it terrible.”

“Wonder how far that blamed old tree carried us,” said Pete, rather anxiously. “It’s just curred to me that if we don’t connect with the stock and some grub pretty quick, we’ll be in a bad fix.”

He gazed about him as he spoke. On every side stretched monotonous plains covered with the same gray-green brush as the savannah amidst which they had camped the night before. But the question in Pete’s mind was whether or not it was the same plain or another altogether on which they stood.

But fortunately for them, for they were not in the mood or condition to stand hardship long, they were not destined to remain long in doubt as to the whereabouts of their companions. While they were gazing anxiously into the distance Jack’s keen eye suddenly detected a sharp flash off to the eastward. It was as if the sun had glinted for an instant on a bit of sharply cut diamond. The flash was as bright as a sudden ray of fire. The next instant it was seen no more. But a second later it flashed up again. This time the glitter was to be seen for a longer interval.

“What on airth is it?” gasped Pete, to whom Jack had indicated the phenomenon.

“Wait one moment and maybe I can tell you if it is what I hope,” cried Jack in an excited tone. With burning eyes he watched the distant point of light flashing and twinkling like a vanishing and reappearing star.

“Hooray!” he cried suddenly, “it’s all right! It’s Ralph and the rest and they are all safe. But they don’t know yet where we are.”

Pete gazed at the boy as if he suspected that the stress of the night might have turned his mind.

“Anything else you kin see off thar?” he asked sardonically.

“Nothing but that they say the horses are all right, and that if we see their signals we are to send up a smoke column,” replied Jack calmly, his countenance all aglow.

“Look hyar, Jack Merrill, I promised your father ter take care of yer,” said Pete sternly, “an’ I don’t want ter take back a raving loonertick to him. What’s all this mean?”

“That Ralph is signalling with a bit of mirror,—heliographing, they call it in the army,” cried Jack, with a merry laugh, which rather discomfited Pete.

“Wall, that may be, too,” he admitted grudgingly, “thar sun would catch it and make it flash. But how under ther etarnal stars kin you tell what he’s saying?”

“Simple enough,” rejoined Jack; “he was making the flashes long and short,—using the Morse telegraph code, in fact. You know we had a cadet corps at Stonefell to which we both belonged. Field signalling and heliographing was part of our camping instruction, but I guess neither of us ever dreamed it would come in handy in such a way as this. That certainly was a bully idea of Ralph’s. He knew if we were any place around we would see the flashes and be able to read them, whereas we couldn’t have sighted them in the tall brush so easily and might have missed them altogether.”

“Wall, what air we goin’ ter do now?” asked Pete, rather apathetically.

“Do? Why, light a fire, of course. Then they’ll see the smoke column and come over to us with grub and the ponies.”

“Hum,” snorted Pete. “Got any matches?”

“Why, no. Haven’t you?”

“Nary a one.”

“Phew!” whistled Jack. “Now we are in a fix for certain. What can we do?”

“Keep your shirt—or what’s left of it—on, son, you’ll need it,” said Pete slowly, a smile overspreading his sun-bronzed features, “thar’s more ways of killing cats than choking ’em ter death with superfine cream. Likewise thar’s more ways of lighting a fire than by using parlor matches.”

Jack watched Pete wonderingly as he took out his knife in silence and strode off to the tree. He found a dead branch and whittling off the wet outside bark soon reached the dry interior. This done, he cut the wood down to a stick about two feet long and a little thicker than a stout lead pencil. Then he hacked away at some more of the dry wood till he had a small flat bit of thoroughly dry timber. In this he excavated a small hole to fit the point of the pencil-like stick.

“Now git me some dry twigs from that brush yonder,” he directed Jack, who had been gazing on these preparations with much interest and a dawning perception of what the old plainsman was going to do.

By the time Jack was back with the twigs,—the dryest he could find,—Pete had scraped off a lot of sawdust-like whittlings and piled them about the hole he had dug out. Then taking the pencil-like stick between his palms, he inserted its lower end in the hole, carefully heaped the sawdust stuff about it, and began rotating it slowly at first and then fast.

All at once a smell of burning wood permeated the air. From the sawdust a tiny puff of blue smoke rolled up. Suddenly it broke into flame.

“Now the twigs! Quick!” cried Pete, and as Jack gave him the dry bits of stick he piled them on the blazing punk-wood, blowing cautiously at the flame. In ten minutes he had a roaring fire. But the old plainsman’s work wasn’t finished yet. He began hacking green branches from the tree and piling them on top of his blaze.

Instantly a pillar of dun-colored, smoke, thick and greasy, rolled upward into the still air.

Pete took off his leather coat and threw it over the smoking pyre, smothering the column of vapor.

“Now then, son,” he said, with the faintest trace of triumph in his voice, “yer see that this here hell-io-what-you-may-call ’em, ain’t ther only trick in the plainsman’s bag. By raising and lowering that coat you kin talk in your Remorse thing as long as you like.”

“Pete, I take off my hat to you,” exclaimed Jack, feeling ashamed of the rather superior manner he had assumed when talking of the heliograph a while before.

“That’s all right, son. But take it frum yer Uncle Dudley that we none of us know everything. Thar’s things you kin larn from an Injun, jus’ as I larned how ter git that fire a-goin’.”

Kneeling by the smoldering smoke-pile, Jack raised and lowered the coat at long and short intervals, forming a species of smoke telegraphy easily readable by anyone who understood the Morse code.

An hour of anxious waiting followed and then upon the scene galloped at top speed the rest of the adventurers bearing with them some food, scanty but welcome, and best of all, the ponies and one rifle.