As the weeks wore by, several other dead rabbits were reported, and despite the grumbling of the head gardener, the tumultuous and merry students had quite a revenue, and their hopes for the future were high, especially when that artillery should arrive from Boston!
Meantime, the little brown Aztec boy had done nothing at all. However, when Friday afternoon came, he earnestly begged, and finally obtained, leave to go down to his home at Tia Juana. He wanted very much to see his Mexican mother and his six little Mexican brothers, and his sixty, more or less, little Mexican cousins.
But lo! on Saturday morning, bright and early, back came the little Bear-Slayer, as he was called by the boys, and at his heels came toddling and tumbling not only his six half-naked little brown brothers, but dozens of his cousins.
Each carried a bundle on his back. These bundles were long, finely woven bird-nets, and these nets were made of the fiber of the misnamed century plant, the agave.
This queer looking line of barefooted, bareheaded, diminutive beings, headed by the silent little Aztec, hastily dispersed itself along the outer edge of the grounds next to the chaparral abode of the jack-rabbits, and then, while grave professors leaned from their windows, and a hundred curious white boys looked on, these little brown fellows fastened all their long bird-nets together, and stretched two wide wings out and up the hill.
Very quiet but very quick they were, and when all the nets had been unwound and stretched out in a great letter V far up the hill, it was seen that each brown boy had a long, heavy manzanita wood club in his hand.
Suddenly and silently as they had come they all disappeared up and over the hills beyond, and in the dense black chaparral.
Where had they gone and what did all this silent mystery mean? One, two, three hours! What had become of this strange little army of silent brown boys?
Another hour passed. Not a boy, not a sign, not a sound. What did it all mean?