"What! three dollars and seventy-five cents for that fly-ridden stuff?"
"That's the charge, stranger."
Rob, seeing there was no use arguing, paid over the money, in exchange for which they had received three greasy plates of soup, three portions of ragged, overdone bull beef, and three slabs of raisin pie, together with three cups of muddy, inky coffee. But a sudden impulse of curiosity gripped him.
"Say, what's the twenty-five cents extra all round for?" he asked.
"Fer your ponies," rejoined the landlord, more miserably than ever. He seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears.
"Ponies!" gasped Rob. "We haven't got any."
"Never mind, it's a rule of the house," said the landlord, as if that settled the matter; "and if you ain't got any ponies it ain't my fault, is it?"
There was no answering this sort of logic, and the boys strolled out to the porch to see if they could sight any trace of Harry Harkness. There was no sign of him, however, and after a prolonged period of gazing across the blazing desert, the boys sank back in three of the big rockers that stood in a row on the porch. It was dull, sitting there in the intense heat and drowsy silence, broken only at long intervals by the clatter of a pony's hoofs as some cow-puncher ambled by at an easy lope. A loud snore from Tubby soon proclaimed that he was off, and Merritt and Rob were about to follow him into the land of dreams, when there came a sudden interruption.
Rob felt his shoulder roughly seized from behind, and a harsh, mandatory voice addressed him:
"Say, that's my chair you're sitting in. You'll have to get out."