Silva, however, wouldn’t wait. Fired with his initial success, he ran after the ball and lifted it again before Fritz could come near enough to kick. The ardor of the Mexican took him and the ball off the mesa and southward along the high, steep wall of the cañon, below Tinaja Wells. Fritz was in hot pursuit, and Frank and his chums came out from behind the bowlders and hurried along after the Dutch boy in order to see the outcome of the one-sided “match.”
Silva, the bounding ball, and Fritz were lost in the rough country adjacent to the cañon’s brink; and when the trailers had come up with the Dutchman and the Mexican they found the two locked in a deadly struggle.
Silva, it seems, had kicked the ball into the cañon, and while he was peering over the rim looking for it, fat Fritz had overhauled him and, in his wrath, had gone for him hammer and tongs.
While Merriwell, Ballard, and Darrel were separating the combatants, Clancy was kneeling on the rim rock and peering downward in an attempt to locate the ball. Suddenly he got up and whirled around.
“Here’s a go!” he exclaimed. “A five-dollar ball has gone to blazes, Chip. It’s about thirty feet down a sheer wall, on a bit of a shelf. We’ll have to sprout wings before we ever get hold of that ball again. You’ll have to dock Carrots’ and Hot Tamale’s wages for the price of it.”
A howl of protest went up from Fritz and Silva.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.
“Keep these scrappers apart, Pink, you and Darrel,” said Merry, moving over to Clancy’s side. “If that ball is only thirty feet away, Clan,” he added to his red-headed chum, “we’ll be able to get it, all right.”
“I don’d pay for nodding,” puffed the enraged Fritz. “Dot greaser feller kicked him ofer, und you vill take der money oudt oof der pay vat comes py him.”