"I don't understand it at all."
"You will when you get there."
Tad was mystified. The solution of the mystery was beyond him.
"If he isn't drowned, he's in luck," snapped Parry.
"Drowned?" wondered his companion.
They cleared the intervening space that lay between them and the fat boy's pony in a series of convulsive leaps that the bronchos took under the urgent pressure of the rowels of their riders' spurs.
As they neared the scene Tad espied a hole in the desert, and began to understand. Stacy also had struck a thin crust and had broken through. Yet what had happened to him after that, Tad did not know.
Both would-be rescuers leaped from their ponies and ran to the spot.
With his body submerged, his head barely protruding above the water, sat Stacy, vigorously rubbing his eyes to get the brown alkali water out of them sufficiently to enable him to look about and determine what had happened to him.
The rest of the party dashed up with loud shouts of alarm, hurling a series of rapid-fire questions at the guide.