The Border Boys Across the Frontier

E-text prepared by Al Haines


Can you make out any sign of the mesa yet, Pete?
The speaker, a sun-bronzed lad of about seventeen, mounted on a bright bay pony with a white-starred forehead, drew rein as he spoke. Shoving back his sombrero, he shielded his eyes from the shimmering desert glare with one hand and gazed intently off into the southwest.
Nope; nary a speck, so fur. Queer, too; we ought to be seein' it by now.
Coyote Pete, as angular, rangy and sinewy as ever, gazed as intently in the same direction as the lad, Jack Merrill, himself. The pause allowed the remainder of the party to ride up. There was Ralph Stetson, a good deal browner and sturdier-looking than when we encountered him last in The Border Boys on the Trail ; Walt Phelps, the ranch boy, whose blazing hair outrivaled the glowing sun; and the bony, grotesque form of Professor Wintergreen, preceptor of Latin and the kindred tongues at Stonefell College, and amateur archaeologist. Lest they might feel slighted, let us introduce also, One Spot, Two Spot and Three Spot, the pack burros.
I always had an idea that the Haunted Mesa formed quite a prominent object in the landscape, put in Professor Wintergreen, referring to a small leather-bound book, which he had just taken from one of his saddle-bags.
And I always had an idea, laughed Ralph Stetson, that a landscape meant something with brooks and green trees and cows and—and things, in it.
The young son of King Pin Stetson, the Eastern Railroad King, looked about him at the gray desert, above which the sun blazed mercilessly down with all the intensity of a burning glass. Here and there were isolated clumps of rank-odored mesquite, the dreariest looking gray-green bush imaginable. The scanty specimens of this variety of the vegetable life of the desert were interspersed here and there by groups of scraggly, prickly cacti. Across such country as this, the party had been making its way for the past day and a half,—ever since, in fact, they had left behind them the foothills of the Hachetas, where, as we know, was located the ranch of Jack Merrill's father, and had entered the dry, almost untravelled solitudes of the Playas.