Merry, handkerchief over his face, was squirming in his chair.
“I’m all right, professor,” he answered, in a smothered voice.
Clancy stood at the end of the porch, leaning against the wall of the hotel with his back to the professor and Pophagan. His shoulders were heaving convulsively.
Ballard continued to lean over the rail, keeping his face averted and doing his best to stifle his laughter.
“Better go into the hotel, young gentlemen,” suggested the professor, “and get some fans. I’m going. I feel as though I was being incinerated.”
“Me, too,” chimed in Pophagan. “If this gits much worse, we’ll all be burnin’ up. Can’t remember a time like this since the summer o’ ninety-six. You could fry eggs in the sun that year. Rattlesnakes an’ coyotes got grilled in the desert afore they could hunt their holes. There was a drummer stoppin’ with me then, an’ he wore a celluloid collar. He went out to sell a bill o’ goods an’ the collar exploded. Pair o’ rubber boots I had melted into a chunk. Whoosh!”
Pophagan, closely followed by the professor, melted into the hotel. The youngsters on the porch pulled themselves together, exchanged glances, and went into another spasm of laughter.
“Got to keep this going,” sputtered Clancy, lighting another piece of paper and fanning it back and forth around the bulb of the thermometer. “This is the most fun I’ve had since Pop and Woo Sing went hunting cats.”
“We’ll have the whole town fried to a frazzle,” hiccuped Ballard. “I never thought a thermometer made the weather before, but this seems to prove it.”
“You don’t have to do that, boys, to get things warmed up,” remarked some one, with a laugh, from the foot of the veranda steps. “I’m bringing you a proposition that will do more to warm things up than all the overheated thermometers in Arizona.”