CHAPTER I
"Say, boys, this is the best ever! We've got a chance to go out on a ranch and play cowboys!"
It was Frank Haven who spoke, and if he had hoped that his words would make a sensation he was not disappointed.
Sammy Brown jumped as though he had been shot, and Bob Bouncer almost choked on a sandwich he was eating. Part of it went down the wrong way, and his chums had to give him a good thumping on the back before he was himself again.
Then he and Sammy backed Frank up into a corner.
"Now, say that again and say it slow," commanded Sammy.
"And no fooling, mind," added Bob. "Give it to us straight."
"Who's fooling?" asked Frank indignantly. "You're a nice one to say that, Bob Bouncer, when you're playing tricks on everybody around you all the time!"
"That's right," agreed Sammy. "Who was it that slipped that crab between the sheets the other night?"
Bob tried to look innocent but it was not a great success.
"He could have climbed there himself, couldn't he?" he ventured weakly. "But never mind about the crab," he went on hurriedly, as he saw the look on his companions' faces. "Go ahead, Frank, and tell us what you meant when you were talking about cowboys."
Frank shook before their eyes a letter that he held open in his hand.
"It's from my brother George," he explained. "It came in the first mail this morning."
Then he paused and pretended to read the letter over again, watching, out of the corner of his eye, his companions fairly dancing with impatience.
"What are you so slow about?" wailed Sammy.
"Get a move on!" Bob fairly shouted.
"What's your hurry?" drawled Frank, as he pretended to puzzle over the writing.
"I guess I can make it out," he said at last, hopefully.
"Of course you can make it out," fretted Sammy, wild with impatience.
"You didn't have any trouble reading it before," grumbled Bob, suspiciously.
"This light isn't any too good," remarked Frank, squinting up his eyes.
This was the last straw that broke the camel's back.
Bob reached over and snatched the letter out of Frank's hands, and together with Sammy ran over to a large rock near the shore of the cove, with Frank in hot pursuit.
Bob and Sammy reached the goal first and dodged around, keeping the rock between themselves and Frank as the latter tried to recover his letter.
"Oh, come, fellows, that isn't fair," protested Frank. "It's my letter, you know. Hand it over."
"We'll read it for you first," chuckled Sammy.
"So you won't have to hurt your poor eyes," mocked Bob.
Frank saw that the odds were against him, so he tried to compromise.
"I won't tease you any more," he said. "Give it to me and I'll read you every word of it right off."
Frank was as good as his word, as the others knew he would be, and without any further nonsense read the letter aloud.
Bob and Sammy listened with the utmost eagerness, their hearts beating fast as they realized all the letter meant.
Frank finished reading and folded up the letter with a flourish. Then the three boys stared at each other.
"On a ranch!" gasped Bob.
"With the cowboys!" shouted Sammy.
"It sounds too good to be true," breathed Frank.
It was no wonder that the news should almost take their breath away. No group of jolly, happy-go-lucky small boys on earth could help being excited over it.
Frank's brother George, who was several years older than he, had written, saying that he and Frank had received an invitation to spend the rest of the Summer on a far Western ranch. The owner of the ranch, Mr. Claxton, was a distant connection of the Haven family; and a year before Mr. Haven had been able to do him a great service in connection with a business matter. Mr. Claxton was very grateful, and in a recent letter he had urged the Haven boys to come out and visit him on his ranch. In the breezy way of Westerners he had told them to bring along some of their friends if they wanted to, as there was plenty of room on the ranch and he liked to have lots of boys around him.
"And George hasn't waited a minute to let us know about it," said Frank. "He only got the invitation yesterday and he sat right down and wrote this letter."
"That's bully of him," remarked Bob.
"I wonder if he knew what a rumpus it would make when we got it," observed Sammy.
"I guess he knew pretty well," laughed Frank. "But say, fellows, isn't it the best thing that ever happened?"
"You bet it is!" agreed Bob, fervently.
"A real ranch!" exulted Sammy. "Up to now I've seen them only in moving pictures."
"I never thought I'd see the real thing in all my life!" said Bob, as he danced a jig.
"And cowboys!"
"And Indians, maybe!"
"And Mexicans!"
"And bucking bronchos!"
"And rattlesnakes!"
"And panthers!"
The exclamations tumbled over one another as they came from the lips of the delighted boys.
"Maybe we'll find some treasure out there," ventured Sammy, who was always looking for some mystery. "A deserted gold mine or something like that."
"Why should any one desert a gold mine?" asked Bob.
"That's a thing people usually stick to instead of running away from," added Frank.
"The man who owned it might die, mightn't he?" defended Sammy, stoutly. "Or Indians might have come upon him in the night and driven him away."
"Well, you may have my share of any gold we find," said Bob, skeptically.
"Mine, too," echoed Frank, who, like Bob, had not much faith in Sammy's dreams.
But Sammy, although most of his hopes so far had come to grief, was not a bit discouraged by the gibes of his chums.
"You fellows would be mighty sore if I took you up," he said stubbornly.
"I'm not worrying," said Bob, grandly.
"Don't hold your breath until you get hold of that gold mine, Sammy," advised Frank.
"But say!" exclaimed Sammy, changing the subject as a new thought occurred to him, "how do we know that our folks will let us go so far away?"
This was like a dash of cold water on the little group. Had they been taking too much for granted?
Frank was the first to rally.
"Of course they will!" he ejaculated. "I know that my father and mother will anyway, for George must have talked with them about it before he wrote this letter, and if they weren't willing he would have said so."
"That's all very well for you," said Sammy. "But how about Bob and me?"
"Well, you have tongues in your heads, haven't you?" said the practical Frank. "We can find out about Bob, anyway, by going in right now and asking his mother."
They trooped eagerly into the house where they found Mrs. Bouncer busily engaged in clearing up the breakfast dishes.
"Mercy me!" she exclaimed, with a smile, as they rushed in, "you boys come in like a herd of wild elephants. What's the matter now, I'd like to know?"
All began to talk at once, Frank waving his letter as though it were a flag.
Mrs. Bouncer made a comical gesture of despair and put her hands to her ears.
"One at a time," she begged. "Frank, you seem to be the most sensible of this noisy crew. Now the rest of you boys keep still and let Frank tell me what it's all about."
"We all want to go out West on a ranch," blurted out Frank.
"Out West? A ranch?" gasped Mrs. Bouncer. "What on earth do you mean?"
"This letter will tell all about it better than I can," replied Frank, handing over the important sheet of paper.
Mrs. Bouncer read with the utmost interest while the boys watched her face hopefully. After she had finished she turned back and read it all over again. Then she handed the letter back to Frank.
"How about it, Ma?" asked Bob, who was bursting with impatience. "You're going to let me go, aren't you?"
"Please say yes, Mrs. Bouncer," coaxed Frank.
"We'll all have such a splendid time," added Sammy.
Mrs. Bouncer looked around smilingly on the eager faces.
"The whole thing has taken me so by surprise," she said, "that I hardly know what to say yet. And, of course, I shall have to talk it over with Mr. Bouncer when he comes home to-night."
The boys' faces fell a little at the prospect of delay.
"But I don't mind saying," continued Mrs. Bouncer, "that as far as I'm concerned I'm willing that Bob shall go."
A jubilant shout rose from her small audience.
"That means I can go," cried Bob, cavorting around the room, "because dad always is willing to let ma do as she likes in things like this."
"Don't be too sure," warned Mrs. Bouncer with a laugh, but Bob felt that his cause was won.
"Now, I'm going to shoo you boys out," said Mrs. Bouncer, rising to resume her interrupted work, and the boys capered out into the sunshine of the late July morning.
"That settles it for two of us anyway," exulted Frank.
"It doesn't just exactly settle it, of course," remarked Bob. "But I'm 'most sure that dad will let me go. He hasn't forgotten that he was a boy once himself."
"Now all we have to do is to make sure that Sammy can go, too," said Frank.
"And find his gold mine," put in Bob, slyly.
"I'll write home right away and find out," declared Sammy.
"Do you think your folks will let you go?" asked Frank.
"Of course they will," put in Bob, confidently. "They let him come from Fairview to this place, didn't they? Why won't they be willing then to let him go out West?"
"That's quite another thing," said Sammy, doubtfully. "They know that if I got sick here or anything happened to me they could get to me in a few hours. Then, too, they know your mother and feel perfectly safe as long as I'm staying here with her. But out West, it's hundreds of miles away——"
"Hundreds!" exclaimed Bob, scornfully. "It's thousands of miles away, that's what it is!"
"How many thousands, smarty?" asked Sammy, a little roiled at the interruption.
"It must be ten thousand anyway," returned Bob positively.
"Ten thousand, your grandmother!" retorted Sammy. "It isn't half as far as that to the Pacific Ocean."
Bob would have liked to contradict him, but geography was not one of his strong points and he thought it might be a little better to stay silent.
"As I was saying," went on Sammy, throwing out his chest a little, "there isn't any telling what the folks may think about my going so far away. But I'll get some paper and a pen and write to them this very minute."
"Why not send a telegram?" suggested Frank. "It'll take a day for the letter to get there and another day to get an answer. But you might get an answer to a telegram in an hour or two."
Bob seconded this idea and Sammy himself at first was strongly inclined toward it. But after thinking it over, he shook his head reluctantly.
"No good," he decided. "I couldn't say enough in a telegram. They couldn't get the straight of it and they'd telegraph back telling me to write a letter and tell them all about it. So I might as well write it first as last."
Although to wait two days seemed like that many years to the impatient boys, they saw the sense in what Sammy said, and the latter, having obtained a pen and a sheet of paper, was about to begin his letter, when Bob was struck by a happy thought.
"I tell you what, Sammy," he suggested eagerly, "you've got to write to them, but there's no reason why they can't telegraph back to you as soon as they've written the letter and made up their minds. That'll save a whole day of waiting, anyway."
"That's bully!" put in Frank, delightedly.
"So it is," agreed Sammy. "That is, if the answer's what I want it to be. But if the telegram says 'No' I'll wish I'd waited for the letter. I'd have had another day of hoping, anyway."
"There isn't going to be any 'No,'" declared Bob. "It's going to be a great big 'Yes' and don't you forget it!"
"I hope so," said Sammy, fervently.
He grasped his pen firmly, thrust his tongue into his cheek, as was his habit when composing, and set to work with all the earnestness he could muster to persuade his parents to let him go westward with his chums. They sat by sympathetically, putting in a word or an idea here and there to make the case stronger, and as a final clincher, Frank gave Bobby the letter from George to be enclosed with his own.
When at last Sammy had finished, he read his letter over to his friends and they agreed that it was a masterpiece.
"That'll fetch 'em," declared Frank with decision.
"They can't say No to a letter like that," was Bob's verdict.
To make sure that it was all right, they submitted the letter to Mrs. Bouncer, and though she smiled at some of the grammar and spelling, they took the smiles to be approving ones, and their pride grew that they all had shared in such a work of art.
"Isn't it a dandy letter, Ma?" inquired Bob, proudly.
"They all helped me with it," said Sammy, generously.
"It sounds pretty good to me," added Frank.
"It's all right, boys," said Mrs. Bouncer, warmly. "And from what I know of your mother, Sammy, I feel pretty sure she will let you go. Here's a stamp for you to put on the letter; and you'd better take it right over to the post-office so that it will be sure to go out by the next mail."
The boys scurried away like so many young rabbits, and Mrs. Bouncer looked after them with a smile in her eyes.
The boys soon reached the village post-office, which was less than a five-minutes' walk from the Bouncer cottage, and deposited the letter in the box for the outgoing mail as carefully as though it were glass and they were afraid it might break.
Then, after leaving a little of their pocket money in the village candy store in return for some jujube paste and everlasting suckers, they made their way back to the cottage on the beach, chattering as well as they could with their mouths full of candy.
"It'll be dandy to go out on the ranch," mumbled Sammy; "but we surely will miss some of the fun we've had around here this Summer."
"That's so," replied Bob, a little regretfully. "I wonder if there'll be any place to swim out there."
"There must be plenty of water somewhere around," said Frank, thoughtfully. "I've read a lot about prairie schooners, and, of course, they can't sail without water."
"Listen to him!" shrieked Bob. "Why, you goose, don't you know that prairie schooners are only big wagons?"
"I don't believe it," said Frank, stoutly.
"Bob's right," declared Sammy. "I saw a picture of one a little while ago. It had four horses hitched to it and a man was driving."
"Maybe that was another kind of schooner," suggested Frank, though weakening somewhat before the positive statements of his chums. "Anyhow, there must be ponds or lakes or rivers of some kind. How could the cattle get water if there wasn't?"
"Maybe we'll run across some underground river that will lead to a robber's cave or something," broke in Sammy, eagerly. "You know, the kind that's running along all right and then suddenly sinks down in the ground and people think that's the end of it until they find it starting up again a good many miles away. But what's it been doing while it's been out of sight? Running through a cave of course. Robbers choose just that kind of place——"
"Oh, forget it, Sammy," broke in Bob with a tired expression. "You're thinking of nothing all the time but robbers and mysteries."
"And if he ever saw a robber," added Frank, "he'd run hard to get away from him."
"Of course I would," admitted Sammy. "And so would you, too. But they can't hang around their caves all the time, and we might keep watch and slide in when there was nobody there. There's no telling what we might find."
"Well, we won't count the money just yet anyway," said Bob with a grin. "But speaking of water has made me so hot that I'm going in for a swim. Come along, fellows, and see who'll get his bathing suit on first. Maybe we won't have many more chances and we'd better make the most of them."
They broke into a run, reached the cottage, and soon had slipped into their bathing shirts and trunks.
"The last one in is a Chinaman," sang out Bob, gaily, as the three made a dash for the beach.
They struck the water so nearly at the same time that each denied being a Chinaman and none of the others could prove it.
The water was delightfully cool and refreshing after their trip to the village in the hot sun, and they splashed around merrily.
"Say, fellows, let's swim over to the place where the pirate ship was wrecked," suggested Sammy, as he rose, puffing and blowing, from a longer dive than usual.
"Pirate ship nothing!" snorted Bob. "There you go again, Sammy."
"Well, you don't know that it wasn't," retorted Sammy. "There's part of a ship of some kind wrecked there, and it might just as well have been a pirate as any other kind."
"Cut out the scrapping, you fellows," advised Frank. "You waste more time talking about things you don't know anything about than any fellows I know."
"There are others," Bob came back at him. "Who was it that was talking a little while ago about prairie schooners?"
Sammy opened his mouth to laugh at this, but regretted it the next moment when Frank sent a dash of salt water full in his face. Sammy choked and spluttered and Frank laughed uproariously. But the laugh stopped suddenly, for Bob, who had dived behind him, had caught his legs, and the next instant Frank, too, was swallowing his fill.
There was a good-natured scuffling when he got back again to the surface, and then they came back to Sammy's suggestion to swim out to where the framework of a ship's hull showed above the rocks in which it had been wedged many years before.
"Isn't it a pretty long swim?" asked Frank a little doubtfully.
"It would be if we had to swim all the way," agreed Bob. "But we can wade out a good piece before it gets so deep we'll have to swim."
"I'd like to take a look at the old ship," said Sammy. "Who knows what we might find? I'd made up my mind, anyway, to go out there before the Summer was over. But if we're going away so soon, this may be our last chance. The water may be too rough for us to come in again to-morrow."
It seemed an easy enough swim, and as they had never been expressly forbidden to visit the old wreck they decided to do as Sammy wanted.
They found they could wade for fully a third of the way. Then the water got so deep that they had to swim.
Sammy and Frank were a little in advance when suddenly they heard a frightened shout from Bob.
They turned just in time to see him wave his hands desperately and then sink from sight!