Clay’s eyes sparkled when the story was told to him.
“It is a joke!” he laughed. “You’ll have to get some fairy tale stronger than that to account for a lost breakfast! Come on, now, who got the cakes? Own up, and I’ll fry more. Who is the villain?”
“You may search me,” Alex answered, dropping into slang. “Case handed them to me and I put them on the edge of the electric coil. They’ve gone up in the air, if anybody should ask you! Right up in the air!”
“Who opened the window?” asked Clay, still unbelieving.
“I did,” Alex answered. “There’s no one out there.”
“No one could get on board without being challenged by Captain Joe,” Case suggested. “Even Teddy would make a row and ask questions of any stranger! It is uncanny! I’m beginning to think the Rambler is haunted. Or it may be the locality! Suppose we pull anchor and go on up?”
“Just my idea!” Alex agreed. “When we get a few miles up the Colorado, I’ll cook bacon and eggs for breakfast, and we can have some of the honey Teddy didn’t get his thieving paws on.”
So the boys brought up the anchor, started the motors, and in ten minutes were pushing up the Colorado. The famous river is wide and shallow at its junction with the Gulf of California, and the constantly changing currents heap sandbars to-day where there was deep water yesterday, so the lads proceeded at less than half speed.
At the end of an hour they were only fifteen miles from the anchorage of the night before. The river was narrowing. To the east a low line of sand hills came down to the water, to the west the foothills of the Sierra de los Cucapas range dropped close to the channel. Something less than one hundred miles to the north was Yuma, where the Southern Pacific Railroad crosses the stream.
The lads cast anchor near the west shore, and Alex brought out the bacon and eggs, while Case proceeded to brew fresh coffee. By this time the sun was shining blisteringly on the deck of the motor boat, and all three lads were in the cabin, with all the small windows open to the slight breeze.