Burke bit off his words abruptly. His eyes were fixed on the trail that led from the main road to Gold Hill to the clubhouse.
“Who’s that over there?” he asked, with a hint of a laugh in his voice. “The man, whoever he is, seems to be having a little trouble.”
Against the clear, bright sky a man on a mule stood out in clean-cut prominence. The man was tall and angular, while the mule was long and equally angular. The mule was at a standstill, his long ears laid back, and the rider was pounding his bony sides desperately in an attempt to get him to move.
“Holy smoke!” chuckled Clancy; “why, that’s Professor Phineas Borrodaile, our tutor, and he’s trying to make Pophagan’s mule, Uncle Sam, carry him on to the clubhouse.”
“Uncle Sam appears to be an obstinate brute,” laughed Burke.
“He’s worse than that,” grinned Merriwell. “When Uncle Sam starts, he’s liable to begin all at once and go straight up in the air before he moves ahead. We know a little about that mule, and the professor ought to be pretty well acquainted with him by this time. He—— Ah, look at that, will you?”
Uncle Sam had suddenly resented the sting of the quirt. As though propelled by springs he had all at once bounded upward.
Daylight showed between the professor and the saddle, but he kept himself from going overboard by grabbing at the saddle horn with both hands. This time, at least, the upward jump was not followed by a movement forward; on the contrary, Uncle Sam continued to rise in the air, but not altogether, as at first. The brute was full of tricks and vagaries, and he began to rise now forward and now at the rear, canting himself from one position into the other with a lightninglike, seesaw motion that must have been intensely disagreeable to Professor Borrodaile. It was rather edifying to the super and the boys, however.
The professor’s hat was jarred off, and the skirts of his long, black coat billowed about him with each upward spring of the mule. The rider, flung alternately toward the front of the quadruped and then toward the back, was put to it to remain in the saddle. Language could be heard, flowing copiously across the bleak sands from the professor—words of many syllables, some Latin and a little Greek, but all well calculated to express the professor’s annoyance.
Burke bowed his head and shook with suppressed mirth. Clancy snickered. Merry, knowing the professor was safe from injury, took his own toll of enjoyment. All three of them laid a course calculated to bring them to the part of the trail at that moment occupied by the professor and Uncle Sam.