“It will look like a clear case,” he went on. “The old gent will come here to-morrow morning, find the safe open, the window unlocked, the money gone—and Darrel’s knife on the floor! I’ll bet a row of ’dobies,” he added fiercely, “that will fix Darrel for good. What did he want to come back here for, anyhow? He ought to have had better sense. Lucky thing I had to run into town from Mohave Cañon, in order to fix up a scheme to knock Frank Merriwell out; and it’s lucky I was leaving the house and saw Darrel, and spied on him instead of giving a yell and facing him down. Oh, I reckon things are coming my way, all right! But Darrel—here! Who’d have dreamed of such a thing? There’ll be merry blazes when the old gent gets home to-morrow!”
Chuckling to himself, the plotter put out the lights, made his way to the front door, and was soon clear of the house and in the street. He had laid an evil train of circumstantial evidence, designed to benefit himself at the expense of Darrel.
[CHAPTER II.]
A STRANGER IN CAMP.
Frank Merriwell, junior, and his two chums, Owen Clancy and Billy Ballard, were camping at Tinaja Wells with the football squad of the Ophir Athletic Club. Besides Frank and his friends there were fifteen campers in the grove at the Wells, enumerated by Ballard as one professor, one Mexican, one Dutchman, and twelve knights of the pigskin.
The professor was Phineas Borrodaile. He hailed originally from a prep school in the middle West, had come to Arizona for his health, and, aided by the two Merriwells, senior and junior, had found wealth as well. The professor was now being retained as instructor by young Frank and his chums, thus enabling them to keep up with their studies while “roughing it” in the Southwest.
The Mexican was Silva, the packer. Silva had a burro train, and had packed the equipment of the campers over the fifteen miles separating Ophir from Tinaja Wells. For ten miles the trail was a good wagon road; but from Dolliver’s, at the mouth of Mohave Cañon, up the cañon to Tinaja Wells, the trail was a mere bridle path, and only pack animals could get over it. Hence the lads had found it necessary to make use of Silva and his burros.
The Mexican had hired out as cook, as well as packer; but two days of Silva’s red-hot Mexican cooking, with garlic trimmings, made it necessary for the boys either to line themselves with asbestos or get another cook. Clancy was sent in to Ophir and he came back with Fritz Gesundheit, the Dutchman. Fritz had presided over a chuck shanty in the cattle country, and carried recommendations which highly extolled his sour-dough bread, flap jacks, and crullers.
Fritz was nearly as broad as he was high, but he proved a chef of rare attainments. He would roll around between the stove and the chuck tent, and play an errorless game in his cooking and serving; but let him waddle out of his culinary environment and he was as full of blunders as a porcupine is of quills. For a lot of skylarking boys, he was an everlasting joy and a perpetual delight.
Silva resented the loss of his cooking job. He burned to revenge himself on the fat gringo chingado who had kicked the red peppers and the garlic out of camp and preëmpted the culinary department. Less than an hour after Fritz had evolved his first meal for the campers and covered himself with glory, the Mexican’s dark plots came to a head. Placing the professor’s mule, Uncle Sam, between two clumps of cholla cactus, he smilingly invited Fritz to take a ride.