"What do you boys wish to do?"
"We don't want to be turned back if we can help it. So long as we are convinced that the fellow is a fraud, I say let's go right along regardless of him and his crooked business," urged Tad.
"Are you all agreed on this, boys?" demanded the Professor.
"We are," cried the Pony Rider Boys.
"Then the matter is definitely settled. We move tomorrow morning, the same as usual, and if our friend sees fit to interfere with us we will show him that we are well able to take care of ourselves, that we are not tenderfeet," declared the Professor belligerently.
[CHAPTER XIII]
AN EXHIBITION OF SHEER PLUCK
"No, we will not break camp until nine o'clock," said the Professor when, on the following morning, Ned proposed that they get under way immediately after breakfast. "We promised our friend that we should be here until that hour, you know."
"Then I think I will scout around to see if anything is doing," suggested Tad, who immediately hurried from camp. He returned half an hour later with the information that there wasn't a human being within a mile of them so far as he had been able to learn. It then lacked an hour of nine, so the boys passed the time with packing, joking and talking. They were not greatly troubled, nor would they have been had they known what was before them that day.
Professor Zepplin, too, was filled with the spirit of the occasion. The old soldier never shrank when it came to a battle, though naturally he felt the responsibility of having four boys to look after, even though those boys were pretty well able to take care of themselves, as they had demonstrated on numerous occasions.