The girls, however, began to laugh, Joe looked such an oddity. They turned the tables on him by quizzing him most unmercifully. At last our young hero was very glad to beat a retreat to the backyard, where he found Sandy busy in saddling the horse.
Joe's confederate had roughened himself as much as circumstances permitted. In lieu of a skin cap he tied a big handkerchief round his hat, and stuck a couple of turkey-tail feathers through it. He had manufactured a brace of pistols out of short lengths of bamboo, with corn-cobs, stuck in bored holes at an angle, to form the stocks. These, with a boomerang and nulla-nulla slung at either side, and a short spear fixed in his belt at the back and standing over his head, made him in appearance more like a red Indian than a Colonial free-booter.
"All ready, Hawkeye?"
"Yes, ole pal. The mustang is waiting, and the brave will vault into the saddle at Thundercloud's word of command," answered Hawkeye in bastard Cooperese. Fenimore of that ilk was Sandy's favourite author.
"Hast thou heard the signal of Red Murphy?" said Joe, falling into the strain of speech.
"No, Thundercloud. No sound from our brither of the hither shore hath been borne on the wings of the wind across the——"
"Oh, stow that rot, Sand—Hawkeye! I wonder?——"
"Yon's the cry of the chiel," broke in the would-be brave, as at that moment the cooee of Tom Hawkins, alias Red Murphy, rose in the still air, faint from the distance, but distinct.
"A single cooee! Rippin! he's comin'. Let's mount and wait at the landing."
Hardly had the boys reached the river-bank ere Red Murphy appeared, attired much as the others, with the addition of an old blunderbuss belonging to his father.