FRANK MERRIWELL, JUNIOR, IN ARIZONA.
CHAPTER I.
A SLAVE OF THE NEEDLE.
“Buck up, Shoup! What ails you, anyhow?”
“I’m all in, Len. I d-don’t believe I can take another step. You see, I—I——”
The words faded into a groan, and the tottering youth slumped to his knees, then pitched forward and sprawled out limply in the sandy trail.
There were two of them, and they had been tramping wearily through a defile known as Bitter-root Cañon. The stage trail leading from Ophir, Arizona, to Gold Hill, followed the cañon, and the two lads had been taking this trail.
The trail was white with dust, churned up by the wheels and hoofs that had passed over it. It wound interminably along the cañon’s bed, twisting back and forth through patches of greasewood and mesquite, now hugging one wall and now the other, and again skirting the edge of some brackish pool.
A stream flowed through the cañon, although no one not familiar with such mysterious streams would have guessed it. Like a good many Arizona rivers, the water flowed under the surface, appearing only here and there where bedrock forced it upward.
The lad who had yielded to exhaustion and had fallen must have been nineteen or twenty years of age. He was well dressed, although his clothes were dusty and in disorder. His hair was of a tow color, his eyes a washed-out blue, and his face was hueless—startlingly white and waxlike.