“It would kill my uncle if he thought both his nephews were scoundrels,” Darrel answered. “I can’t have a hand in blackening Jode’s character like this. I’ve put up with a whole lot, and I can put up with a good deal more than I have, but this fight of mine is to prove that I didn’t sign the colonel’s name to a check. See what I mean? I—I can’t kill the colonel’s faith in Jode—not in this way. Don’t say a word about this, any of you. Promise me that you won’t.”
There was something fine and noble about Darrel’s act in destroying the evidence against Jode. It was not the evidence that Darrel wanted. The temptation to ruin his half brother was not so strong as his love for the misguided old colonel, or his desire to prove his own innocence.
Merriwell stepped to the bed and clasped Darrel’s hand.
“That’s right, old man,” said he, “exactly right. Say, Darrel,” and his voice quivered, “you’re a brick!”
[CHAPTER XXV.]
THE UNDER DOG.
“Great Scott, Chip! Say, I didn’t think there was a place like that in Arizona.”
Young Merriwell and his red-headed chum, Owen Clancy, stood on the crest of the long, sloping wall of a gulch and looked downward at a scene that filled them with wonder and admiration.
The gulch was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet deep, and a quarter of a mile from rim to rim. On either side the slopes fell away in a gentle descent, sparsely covered with pine trees, and with here and there a patch of flaming poppies touching the brown of the hillsides as with fire.
In the depths was a long, silvery vista of water, placid, and cool, and deep. At the foot of the slope on whose crest the two lads were standing, was a wide strip of clean yellow sand. Here there were half a dozen white canvas tents, pitched close to the water, with camping equipment scattered in all directions.
Four or five canoes were drawn up on the beach. On a float, a few yards from shore, several lads in “Nature’s raiment” were sitting and splashing their feet in the water; others were diving from the float, their white bodies flashing outward and downward like so many darts, disappearing under the smooth surface of the river and leaving a jet of spray and a quiver of silvery ripples; and still others were swimming, far up and down the stream. All were enjoying themselves to the utmost, if their laughter, echoing and reverberating between the slopes could be taken as an indication.