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CHAPTER X
THE PONIES VANISH

Ralph’s first act on wakening the next morning was to pull open the flap of the tent and gaze out. His next was to utter a shout of surprise. Of the ponies which had been turned out to graze the evening before, not a sign was to be seen. As usual, they had been driven out with old Baldy, the leader of the pack horses, as the “bell” pony. Like most ponies in the wilds, they had hitherto stuck closely to Baldy who, for his part, was usually quite content to remain around camp so long as the grazing was good.

But although Ralph listened closely, he could not catch even the familiar tinkle of the bell that would have told him that Baldy and the rest were somewhere near at hand.

“Well, this is a nice pickle,” he thought, as he set off to stir Jim into wakefulness, “it means a day’s delay while we hunt for the ponies; however, there appears to be plenty of rock in this vicinity for the professor to explore and hammer away at, so I suppose he’ll be happy.”

Jim greeted Ralph’s news without much surprise. It appeared that in years of packing he had grown used to such eccentricities on the part of ponies.

“We’ll track ’em down after breakfast,” he said, rolling out of his blanket and pulling on his boots.

In the meantime Ralph had aroused the others, and they set off for a cool plunge in the stream. The water was icy and made them gasp, but they felt a hundred per cent. better after their bath. As Persimmons put it, “They began to feel as if the world was made of something else than ashes.” While the professor made less strenuous ablutions, the boys rubbed each other into a warm glow and then indulged in a merry game of tag on the springy turf, and yet they were ready to respond eagerly to Jim’s breakfast call of: – “Come and get it!” accompanied by a vigorous solo on the wash tin performed by Jimmie.

It was wonderful what a difference there was in the New York waif already. The crisp mountain air had reddened his pale cheeks and the rough but plentiful “grub” had had its effect in nourishing his skinny frame. The old wistful look still lurked in his eyes, and all the boys’ attempts to drag from him the reason for his desire to penetrate the Rockies were in vain. So, perforce, they had to allow it to remain a mystery till such time as the lad himself chose to enlighten them. Bits of his history he had already imparted to them. The lad had enlivened many a camp fire with stories of his experiences in the saw-dust ring, and in selling papers in New York. Besides this, he had worked at peddling soap powder and household goods, and he had some amusing narratives of his experiences among the farmers of the Catskills where he had worked as an “agent.” And as he lived with the boys, he adopted their language and ways as though he had been born to them.

“There’s a treat for you fellows this morning,” said Jimmie with a mysterious air, as the hungry boys squatted down and prepared to pass up their tin plates for their shares of bacon, bannocks and beans.

“What may that be, Jimmie?” inquired Ralph, while Mountain Jim grinned expansively.

Persimmons sniffed the air anticipatively.

“Seems to me I do smell something good,” he remarked.

“How would pancakes go?” inquired Jimmie.

“Great! Jimmie, you ought to be in Delmonico’s,” cried Hardware hungrily.

“I’ve been on the outside lookin’ in, many a time,” said Jimmie with a grin, as he turned to the “spider” and began dishing up the thin, brown batter cakes.

Mountain Jim was on hand with a tin of maple syrup fashioned like a miniature log-cabin, the chimney forming the spout.

“Eat hearty, boys,” he said, as he passed it along, “and try to forget the black flies for a while.”

Early as the hour was, those pests were already at work, in spite of the “smudge” that Mountain Jim had built.

“Wish I’d put some of that black-fly dope on my hands,” muttered Hardware, “it’s great stuff.”

“Even if it does smell like cold storage eggs with the lid off,” laughed Ralph.

As he spoke he poured a liberal amount of syrup on his cakes. With hearty appetite he cut off a big slice of the top cake and eagerly took it into his mouth. For an instant a puzzled expression played over his features, and then he gave a yell.

“Wow! Oh!” he ejaculated, and bolted from the “table.”

“What’s up? What’s the trouble?” asked the others.

“Been bit by a snake?” asked Mountain Jim apprehensively. “Better get out your medicine chest, professor.”

Ralph was frantically gulping down several dipperfuls of water from the bucket Jimmie had brought from the creek. They watched him with some alarm, holding bits of pancake suspended on their forks.

“Oh-h-h-h!” sputtered Ralph, and then turned to Jimmie, who stood looking on with undisguised amazement.

“Say, you,” he gasped out, “did you put any of that fly dope on your hands this morning?”

“Y-y-y-yes,” stammered Jimmie, a guilty flush spreading over his face, “I did and – ”

“And you forgot to wash it off before you mixed the batter for these cakes,” sputtered Ralph. “Fellows, pancakes flavored with fly dope are the worst ever.”

“Shucks!” grunted Hardware, “and I was counting on pancakes!”

“Dancing dish rags!” growled Persimmons. “What sort of a cook are you anyhow, Jimmie? Flavored with fly dope, – wow! wow!”

Jimmie looked ready to cry, and sniffed his fingers remorsefully.

“Guess you’re right,” he admitted dolefully. “I’m sorry, fellows, but I reckon as a cook I’m a failure.”

“I hope it isn’t poison, that’s all,” groaned Hardware, with a glance at Ralph. “Feel any symptoms, Ralph?”

“None that can’t be stopped by plenty of coffee and a big plateful of grub,” laughed Ralph good-naturedly.

CHAPTER XI
RALPH’S VOLCANO

Mountain Jim’s examination of the trails left by the errant ponies showed that they had scattered in three distinct directions. This confirmed him, he said, in a belief he had previously formed that the animals had been frightened during the night by a bear or mountain lion, the latter called, in that part of the country, a cougar.

No tracks of either wild beast was to be seen, but that by no means proved that they had not been in the vicinity. Horses can scent either a cougar or a bear at a considerable distance when the wind is toward them, and there are few things that more terrify a pony than the near presence of one of these denizens of the northern wilds.

Jim assigned himself to one trail, Persimmons and Hardware to another and Ralph to a third. The professor and Jimmie were to remain in camp and wash dishes and set things to rights, and then Jimmie was to assist the professor in gathering specimens of rock from the cliffs in the vicinity.

It was odd to see how, in an emergency, a man like Mountain Jim, who probably had little more scholarship than would suffice to write his own name, took absolute leadership over the party. The professor, whose name was known to a score of scientific bodies all over the country as a savant of unusual attainments, obeyed the son of the Rockies implicitly. Such men as Jim are natural leaders, and in situations that call for action automatically assume the supremacy over men of theory and book learning.

Jim explained his reason for assigning Ralph to follow a lone trail while the other two lads had been ordered to accompany each other. Ralph had plainly shown his skill as a ranger and had the experience of his life on the Border behind him. The other two, while self-reliant and plucky, had not had the same experience, and therefore the guide deemed it best not to send either out alone.

With hearty “So-longs” the three searching parties set out, striking off in a different direction up the mountain side. It was rough country, with beetling masses of gray rock cropping out now and then amidst the somber green of the Douglas firs and great pines. Here and there cliffs of great height and as smooth as the side of a wall, towered sharply above the forest, and beyond lay a “hog-back” ridge of considerable height. Beyond this, although they could not see them from the valley, the boys knew that mountain range after mountain range was piled up like the billows of an angry sea, with the higher peaks of the Rockies raising their crests like snow-crowned monarchs beyond and above all.

Each boy carried a canteen of water, his rifle, and a supply of bread and chocolates. Of course they also carried their small axes, slung in canvas cases at their belts, and matches in waterproof boxes. These same waterproof match safes were, in fact, among the few “Dingbats” approved by Mountain Jim.

“Dry matches have saved many a man’s life,” he was wont to say.

It was lonesome in the deep woods into which Ralph plunged, after bidding adieu to his comrades. The trail, too, was hard to follow, and kept the lad on the alert, which was as well perhaps, for it kept him from thinking of the solitude of the mountain side. No one who has not penetrated the vast solitudes of the Canadian Rockies can picture just what the boding silence, the utter solitude of the untrodden woods is like. And yet the life in the wilds grows upon men till they love it, as witness the solitary prospectors, packers and trappers to be met in all the wilder parts of the American continent.

As he trudged along toilsomely, Ralph kept a look out for game as well as for the trail, for the camp larder needed replenishing with fresh meat, and he was anxious to bring home his share. In this way he covered some three or four miles, now losing the elusive trail, now picking it up again. The mountain side was steep and rocky and strewn with the fallen trunks of forest giants. But Ralph’s muscles were tough, and clean living and athletics had given him sinew and staying power, so that he was conscious of but little fatigue after a long stretch of such traveling.

Almost as skillfully as Coyote Pete might have done in those days in the southwest, the boy read the trail. Here the ponies had galloped. There they had paused and nibbled grass; in other places, broken boughs or abrasions on a fallen tree trunk marked their path. There were two of the ponies; but just which pair they were, Ralph had, of course, no means of determining.

One thing was plain, they must have been badly frightened; for as has been said in the mountain solitudes, as a rule, ponies will stick close to camp. They appear to dread being separated from human companionship, and few packers or trailers ever find it necessary to tether their animals.

At last the ridge was topped and beyond him, by clambering on a rock, Ralph looked into a deep valley with ridge on ridge of mountains rising beyond it, and beyond them again some snow-capped peaks of considerable height. He scanned the valley as closely as he could, but big timber grew thickly on its sides and bottom and he was not able to see much. There were some open spaces, it is true, but in none of these could he see anything of the missing ponies.

Ralph sat himself down on the flat-topped rock he had climbed, and pulling a bit of chocolate out of his pocket, began to nibble it. He was munching away on his lunch when he saw an odd-looking gray bird, not unlike a partridge, sitting in a hemlock not far from him. The bird did not appear to be scared and regarded the boy with its head cocked inquisitively on one side.

“Well, here goes Number One for the pot,” thought Ralph to himself.

He raised his rifle, and taking careful aim fired at the gray bird. But his hand was shaking somewhat from the exertions of his climb, during which he had had to haul himself over many rough places by grabbing branches, and his bullet flew wide.

“Bother it all,” exclaimed the boy impatiently. “I am a muff for fair.”

But to his astonishment, although the bullet had nicked off some leaves and showered them over the bird’s head, it had not moved. It still sat there giving from time to time an odd sort of croaking sound, not unlike the clucking of a barnyard “biddy.”

“I know what you are now,” chuckled Ralph to himself, for the fact that the bird did not stir helped him to recognize its species from a description given the night before by Mountain Jim, “you’re a ‘fool-hen,’ and you are certainly living up to your name.”

He fired again, and this time the “fool-hen” paid the penalty of its stupidity, for it fell out of the tree dead. Ralph ran forward, picked it up and thrust it into the hunting pocket of his khaki coat.

“It was a shame to shoot you,” he muttered to himself; “too easy. I believe the stories that Jim told about knocking fool-hens out of trees with stones, now that I’ve seen what dumb birds they are. But this isn’t finding those ponies,” he went on to himself. “Guess I’ll strike off down in the valley. There may be some sort of pasture there where they’ll have stopped to feed.”

Suddenly he stopped and sniffed the air suspiciously. An odd, rank odor was borne to him on the light wind.

“Sulphur spring!” he exclaimed half aloud. “Reckon I’ll take a look at it. It can’t be far off; it’s strong enough to be right under my feet. At any rate I shan’t need any other guide than my nose to find it.”

Sniffing the tainted air like a hound on the trail, Ralph set out down the mountain side. As he went the odor grew more pronounced. A few minutes later he came upon a pile of rocks heaped in an untidy mass on the mountain side. From the midst of them a stream of yellowish white fluid was flowing.

“Phew!” exclaimed the boy, “here’s my sulphur spring, sure enough. I guess if it was near to civilization there’d be a big health resort here. Smells bad enough to be good for anything that ails you; but – not for me, thank you. – Hullo! What in the world was that?”

Ralph paused and listened intently. Through the forest came a dull booming sound, and the earth appeared to shake as if agitated by a small earthquake. The boy looked about him apprehensively.

“Well, what in the world!” he began. And then, “It can’t be anybody blasting. Mountain Jim said there was no mining hereabouts. What can it be?”

For some odd reason the recollection of the man on the rock recurred to him. His heart began to pound rather faster than was comfortable.

“Pshaw!” he exclaimed, to quiet his nerves, “I’ve got nothing to fear. I’ve got my rifle and – Great Scott! It’s raining!”

That was the boy’s first thought as a gentle pattering resounded amidst the trees about where he stood.

He looked upward; but the sky was clear; the sun shining brightly. Clearly the pattering was not caused by rain.

“What in the world can it be?” he exclaimed, considerably startled. “Sounds as if somebody was throwing stones or gravel at me.”

The next minute a large globule of mud struck him in his upturned face. Apparently it had fallen from the sky. It was followed by a perfect storm of the mud dobs. They pattered about him in a shower, spattering his clothes and hands.

“It’s raining mud!” gasped the astonished boy, completely at a loss to account for the phenomenon.

CHAPTER XII
JUST IN TIME

Once more the odd booming sound was borne to Ralph’s ears. It came from off to his left. The mud fell again in showers all about him.

“It’s some sort of a boiling spring!” exclaimed Ralph suddenly. “I’ll bet a doughnut that’s what it is. What a chump I was to think that the man on the rock had anything to do with it. Yet it did give me a scare for a minute, too.”

He dashed off in the direction of the booming sound, eager to see what he was certain now had caused the shower of mud. He soon came upon it. In a little clear space amidst the pines he found himself in marshy ground. Rank green grass and flowers of bright colors grew here, and brilliantly colored dragon-flies shot hither and thither through the moist, warm air. The atmosphere held a steamy, unwholesome sort of dampness.

Suddenly there came a rumbling sound which quickly changed to a roar like that of a locomotive blowing off steam, and from the center of the clearing there shot up a clear stream of steaming water. But in a flash its purity was sullied and it turned a dark muddy color. The rumbling increased in violence and a miniature geyser of mud and steaming hot water was shot upward to a considerable height.

Ralph made a swift dash for the shelter of a Douglas fir and looked on curiously while the convulsion of nature lasted. Then he ventured out to examine the geyser more closely. To his disappointment he found that he could not approach the depression from which the mud and water had been spouted upward. The ground was far too swampy to permit such a proceeding and the boy was compelled to look on at the strange sight from a distance.

The convulsions occurred with almost clock-like regularity, at intervals of about ten minutes. As he watched, Ralph thought of the professor, and how delighted the man of science would have been to behold such a sight. He made careful mental notes of the operations of the mud geyser, however, so that he could be sure to give an accurate account of it to the professor when he returned.

Suddenly, behind him, he heard an odd, rustling sort of noise and noticed a movement in the tall grass. He parted the vegetation to see what could be causing the disturbance. The next instant he leaped backward with a spring that would have done credit to a gymnast.

He had almost stepped on a huge rattlesnake that was coiled in the grass. All at once he became aware that in his backward spring he had nearly landed on another of the reptiles, a snake fully five feet in length. This caused the boy to beat a precipitate retreat, choosing open ground for the purpose. It was not till then that he began to notice that the entire vicinity of the hot springs was fairly alive with the scaly reptiles. Undoubtedly they had been attracted there by the warmth of the ground and had a den in the neighborhood.

“Ugh!” exclaimed the boy with a shudder, “I never did like snakes. I guess I’ll get out of this as quickly as possible. Some of those fellows beat anything I saw in Arizona. I don’t fancy their company.”

He retraced his steps to the point where he had left the trail of the missing ponies and took it up once more. It led down into the valley and Ralph, thinking of the scores of serpents that must haunt the vicinity of the geyser, followed it with a thankful feeling that he had seen the rattlers in time to avoid them.

The traveling down the side of the ridge on which he was now was almost as hard as his clamber up the opposite acclivity. To make matters worse he encountered several muskegs smelling strongly of sulphur, and undoubtedly fed by the sulphurous springs higher up the hill. But the boy was grateful for one thing that the softer ground did for him. It made the traveling harder, but, at the same time, it held the prints of the runaways’ hoofs as clear as day; and as well as Ralph could judge from the look of their prints they were fairly fresh, and told him that he could not be far from the strays.

This encouraged him greatly, and he made good time down the hillside, strewn though the way was with obstacles. He was traveling forward thus, when from a patch of flowering shrubs ahead there came a rustle and a crackling.

Ralph’s heart jumped into his mouth. Mountain Jim had declared that the ponies had been scared by a cougar or a bear. Could the creature be just beyond him in that clump of shrubs?

He examined his rifle carefully.

“I don’t want to be treed again,” he said to himself.

So far as he could see, the rifle was in perfect working order. He stood stock still and waited for a recurrence of the disturbance in the bushes.

But following the rustling that had first attracted his attention no sound came. Ralph’s excited imagination showed him a tawny side a dozen times or more, only to be followed by the discovery that it was some dead or faded leaves and not the flank of a bear or cougar that he had spied.

“If something doesn’t happen pretty quick, I’m going to blow up!” exclaimed the boy to himself as he waited, hardly daring to breathe.

All at once there came from the patch of bushes a renewed rustling. It was coming toward him. Ralph clutched his rifle tightly and bit his under lip to keep his nerves under control. The sound was growing nearer now. Was it a bear, or a stealthy, cat-like cougar that was destined to emerge in an instant from its place of concealment?

“It’s coming,” thought Ralph, with a bound of his heart, “I hope I can shoot straight and finish it with one shot.”

He threw up his gun in anticipation and the next instant burst into a loud laugh.

From the bush had emerged, not a bear nor a mountain lion, nor even a deer.

Facing Ralph, and quite as much astonished as he, to judge by its attitude, was a large Canada hare. For an instant boy and hare stood looking at each other, while Ralph shook with laughter over his feelings of trepidation as to what the brush would bring forth.

“Talk about the mountain and the mouse,” he chuckled to himself. “This sure is a modern version of the old fable.”

“Skip along, bunny,” he added the next instant, as the hare, with a spring and a whisk of its stumpy tail, vanished down the mountain side seeking cover, “I wouldn’t take as easy a shot as that, especially when I was looking for big game.”

But the next minute he was destined to get another surprise. Something was coming toward him from another direction, from his right. He could hear its footsteps as it advanced somewhat heavily, cracking branches and twigs.

Then among the tree trunks and underbrush he saw something move. A brown object it appeared to be.

“A deer!” flashed through Ralph’s mind. “I’m in luck to-day.”

With eager eyes riveted on the spot where he had last seen the brown object, Ralph raised his rifle. His hands trembled but he steadied them with an effort, fighting off the attack of “buck fever,” as a hunter’s excitement at the prospect of big game is termed.

Suddenly the brown object appeared again, bobbing about behind a clump of brambles.

“It’s a deer’s head, sure!” breathed Ralph.

He drew a careful bead on the object, devoutly hoping that his sights were adjusted right for the range, which was about a hundred yards.

“Now for it,” he said to himself, as he prepared to press the trigger.

But the shot was never fired, for just as Ralph was about to send a bullet crashing from his weapon there stepped into view from behind the brush, the figure of a man!

Ralph shook as if from a fever. Another instant and he might have been a murderer! The man had revealed himself in the nick of time. But hardly had Ralph discovered his mistake when the man saw him. Without a word he dashed off like a wild animal, crouching and diving as he went, and in a flash was out of sight.

In the brief interval that Ralph had had to scrutinize the man he had so nearly shot, he had not received more than a general impression as to what he looked like. But this impression was startling enough. It was of a creature bearded with a hairy growth that reached almost to his waist, half naked and with long, unkempt hair and wild eyes.

But even so, he had a queer intuition that this half wild creature and the silent watcher on the rock were one and the same individual.