“Whoop!” he shouted. “That certain was a hot old scrimmage. Great tarantulas! Why didn’t we come up in time to get into the fracas! Howling tomcats! but that certain would have been the real stuff! And you beat the whole bunch off, did you, Mr. Merriwell? That’s the kind of timber the Merriwells are made of! You hear me gently warble!”
“Hello, Buckhart!” exclaimed Frank, as the chap swung down from the saddle. Brad Buckhart and Dick Merriwell were chums at the Fardale Military Academy, and Frank knew him for one of the pluckiest young fellows he had ever met. Buckhart was a Texan through and through.
“Put her there, Mr. Merriwell,” said Brad, as he extended his hand—“put her there for ninety days! It does my optics a heap of good to rest them on your phiz. But I’ll never get over our late arrival on the scene of action.”
“We knew you were here somewhere, Frank, when we heard you join in ‘Fair Fardale,’” said Dick.
“And by that sound the greasers knew I had friends coming,” added Merry. “It stopped them and sent them scurrying off in a hurry.”
“Where are they now?” asked Brad. “Why don’t they sail right out here and light into us? Oh, great horn spoon! I haven’t taken in a red-hot fight for so long that I am all rusty in the joints.”
“Where is Felicia, Frank?” anxiously asked Dick.
Merry shook his head.
“I can’t answer that question yet,” he confessed. “I have followed her thus far; of that I am satisfied, for otherwise I don’t believe these men would have attacked me.”
Through the shadows a dark figure came slowly toward them from the direction of the mission building.