“What would we do for our meals,” asked Ballard anxiously, “if Hot Tamale put Carrots in the hospital?”
“You’re always thinking of the eats,” grinned Clancy. “But never mind that, Pink. Come on up, all of you, and see the circus. We’ll hide and watch ’em, and if they get to using their fists, we can interfere.”
The lads started forthwith for the low bank of the mesa, just back of the camp, hurrying along after the excited Clancy.
“Fat Fritz must have another delusion,” observed Ballard. “Yesterday it was buried treasure, and to-day it’s athletics. But who’d ever have thought that Silva could catch the athletic fever?”
“I thought he was too much of a mañana boy to catch anything but the measles,” laughed Darrel. “I’ll bet a bunch of mazuma Hot Tamale is going in for athletics just because he wants to beat out Carrots at the same game.”
“That’s the only reason,” Merriwell answered. “One of them can’t bear to see the other try anything without trying it himself.”
Carefully the lads crept up the slope of the mesa and, from behind a screen of rocks, looked out on the athletic field. They took one long look and then doubled down behind the bowlders to laugh.
Fritz and Silva had raided the camp equipment for a couple of gymnasium suits. Probably they had not been able to choose their costumes with discrimination, but had been obliged to annex the first outfits that came to hand. Yet, be that as it might, each presented a picture that, to use Ballard’s words, would have made “a horse laugh.”
The Dutch boy was too big around for his clothes and too short the other way, while in Silva’s case the matter was exactly the reverse: the running pants flapped distressingly about his bony shanks, while the sleeveless shirt failed to connect with the pants by a good six inches.
Fritz was sweating and grunting and trying to do a pole vault. The bar was about four feet from the ground, and, from the looks of things, seemed some three feet too high.