Excerpt
CHAPTER I A DANGEROUS MISSION
"Hold up there, you pint o' peanuts! Hold up, I say! Well, for the love of spread eagle! I suppose you boys are lookin' for a job; eh?"
The speaker, a typical, raw-boned cowboy, looked down from his pony at three boys seated on a bench at the side of the cook-house.
"Whether we are or not, we've got it, Kid," answered one of the seated trio, a well set-up youth with light hair. "And the funny part of it is, we don't know what the job is."
"Huh! Got a job and you don't know what it is? Well, Nort, guess I'll have to look into this," and the cowboy whom Nort addressed as "Kid"—or, to give him his full nick-name, "Yellin' Kid"—swung lightly from his saddle. "Hold up there, you pony, you!" this as the Kid's mount started to prance about wildly. "Just got this here dust-raiser, and she ain't used to my ways yet," he chuckled. "Hy' ya', Dick, and Bud! How's the boy, Nort? By golly, ranchin' is sure doin' you fellers good! You-all got some powerful grip!"
The three boys, Nort and Dick Shannon, and their cousin Bud Merkel, grinned widely. They were all of the same mold—clean-cut, straight-shooting lads, their faces bronzed from the prairie sun, and their eyes as clear as the blue sky above them.
"Yes, Kid, ranching has done us good—in more ways than one. In fact it's done us up brown." And Bud laughed a little ruefully.
"What's the matter? Rustlers, or disease?" The Kid's face expressed instant concern as he mentioned these two nightmares of the rancher's life.
"No, not either—but something almost as bad. You tell him, Nort," suggested Bud.
"You started it—you might as well finish out, Bud. You know as much about it as I do."
"Aw, get Dick to. He hasn't said a word yet."
"Well, for Pete's sake, somebody tell me before I drop dead from excitement!" burst out Yellin' Kid.
"All right—I'll tell you, Kid," Dick started. "Last week we were to deliver a herd of longhorns to J. K. Jackson, over to Double-O ranch. Sold 'em at a good fat price, too, that would have put us on our feet for the rest of the year. Well, we sent four of our men to ride 'em in. I went along with 'em. We started about sun-up, calculatin' to reach the Double-O before night, and everything was lovely. 'Long about noon we reached the gorge near Galgo. I suggested we ride the cattle as far from the gorge as we could get, 'cause I know how easy a herd of long-horns are started. But no, nothin' would do Sam Holiday but going as near to the big cut as possible, to save time. Sam's our new foreman, you know, and I didn't want to assert myself over him. So we drove 'em close to the edge. I told Sam once or twice to keep away—but oh, no! everything would be all right, and we'd have the cattle in by five o'clock. Well, we had 'em in by five o'clock all right. But not at the Double-O!
"Just as we were passing the deepest part of the cut we heard a most awful Bang! and I knew in a minute what it was. Stump-blasting. Yes, I knew what it was—but the cattle didn't. And nobody had time to tell them, either....