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"What ails the fellow, I wonder?" observed Jerry, who, it seems, had also noticed the rush of the newcomer. "From the way he bolted into the office where Mr. Mabie went, I imagine he must have brought important news of some sort," remarked Frank. "Perhaps our very introduction to the Big M Ranch is going to be in a whirl of excitement, fellows.
"Count me in on that!" exclaimed Will, rushing out of his impromptu dark-room, and waving the bottle in which he was making a solution of hypo. "I think I'll go along, too," remarked Frank, appearing from some other place. When the party started forth presently, there were six of them with the horse the chums, Reddy, and Mr. Mabie himself.
Mabie had shown wonderful confidence in the boy's nerve to thus place the solution of the problem in Jerry's hands. Holding his breath, as he still tugged at the mouth of his refractory mount, Frank saw the smoke shoot out from the muzzle of the gun as the report sounded. "Whoop! He's down!" shrieked a cowboy curveting near by. "Take care! He's coming again, Jerry!" shouted Frank.
Mabie will scent trouble a long way off, and find a refuge among the rocks, if necessary; but I'm inclined to think the fire will never get to him," replied Frank. "Do you believe the wind will shift, then, and blow back on us?" asked Will. "I'm not a wind prophet. What I had in mind was that the fire would be put out before it got three miles from here." "Put out!
The tremendous undertaking they had in view would, very likely, occupy all their spare moments. "Now let's have that letter, Frank. We want to con it so that every word will be photographed on our brains from this time on. Didn't old Jesse say that Martin Mabie was a big stockman now, and had really quit being a guide and hunter?
"I should think anything would," was all Jerry said, and if there was malice in the remark Bluff did not know it in his innocence. While they sat down to eat the lunch they had carried along Frank called attention to the fact that the wind had risen. "Perhaps Mr. Mabie was right, after all, and there is a rainstorm coming before long," suggested Will.
Mabie said that when it did come we'd likely get a drencher. We're getting it, all right," declared Jerry. For another half hour they kept on, though the walking was very hard. "A fine-looking crowd we are," declared Frank, as he surveyed his blackened leggings and sodden coat. "But it seems to me things don't look quite so bad around here," observed Will. "Well, they don't, for a fact.
In the morning preparations for their departure were soon completed. The tents, and all material connected with the camp, went in the wagon, while the boys, together with Mr. Mabie and Reddy, rode horseback. It was an invigorating gallop back to the ranch house, and on the way the chums indulged in a number of little races.
Mabie, "and it's a good thing to get rid of these savage animals in any old way, but I hope I don't take part in another affair like this. He had no chance, poor old chap." The old rancher looked admiringly at the boy. "Those sentiments do you proud, lad, and I appreciate them, too; but business, in my line, must go ahead of sentiment, and this old Charlie was doing me a bad turn.
When Couper's statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his spirit these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of its rivers."
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