“The ears, you mean,” muttered Walt, but he didn’t say it out loud, and the meal passed off merrily after the little passage-at-arms. As it grew dark, they could see the lightning flashes in the far distance quite distinctly. It had a weird effect, this sudden coming and departure of blue flares on the horizon. Against the radiance the serrated outlines of the mountains stood out as if they had been cut from cardboard.
“Going to set a watch to-night?” asked Ralph, as they sat about a fire formed of the tough fibrous roots of the tufted grass, which was really more of a shrub.
“Of course,” rejoined Coyote, “we don’t know whether them varmints of Ramon’s is ahead or ahind, but wherever they are, if we don’t watch out, they’ll do us all the mischief they can.”
“Reckon that’s right,” agreed Ralph, “there’s one good thing, though, they can’t very well creep up on us here.”
“No, that’s one advantage of an open camp,” agreed Jack, “on the other hand, though, we might have a job defending ourselves if attacked.”
More discussion, none of which would be of vital interest to record here, followed. But it did not last long. Thoroughly tired out as our adventurers were, they one by one sought their blankets and the camp was soon wrapped in silence. That is, if the snores of some of the members of the party be excepted. But Coyote, who was on watch, was not bothered with sensitive nerves, and the noise disturbed him not a whit.
It was about midnight, and time for the plainsman to call Jack and Ralph to relieve him on guard, when a most peculiar sound arrested him in the act of crossing to the sleeping lads’ sides.
The noise which had attracted his attention was a most unusual, an almost awe-inspiring one. Coming from no definite quarter, it yet filled the air with an omnipresent rumbling and roaring, not unlike,—so it flashed into Coyote’s mind,—the reverberating rumble of an express train.
“But they ain’t no night mails crossing this savannah as I ever heard on,” he thought.
“Jumping bob cats!” he fairly howled the next instant.