CHAPTER IX
BILLIARD SURRENDERS
Toady kept his promise not to mention Billiard's runaway expedition to anyone else save Gloriana; but being human, he could not keep from twitting his brother occasionally, and the days which followed that memorable night were full of misery for the unhappy boy. His cousins avoided him, Tabitha ignored him, Toady tormented him, and even Gloriana seemed indifferent to his plight. In his fright at discovering himself lost on the desert at night, he had resolved to follow Toady's example and turn over a new leaf. He could not quite make up his mind to confess his sins to eagle-eyed Tabitha, but was really sincere in his desire to do better; and was as surprised as he was disappointed to find that no one paid any attention to the sudden change in his deportment.
"Might as well have kept on being bad," he growled with an injured air one afternoon when a fortnight had passed without any noticeable change in the atmosphere. "Wish I hadn't come back that night. Guess they'd have sung a different tune then! Maybe a coyote would have got me, or I'd have stepped into a rattlesnake's nest and been stung to death. Bet they'd have felt sorry when they found me—," he hesitated. His picture was too vivid, and he shuddered as he thought what a fate would have been his had a rattlesnake bitten him as he tramped across the pathless waste in his flight. "Pretty near dead," he finished finally, unable to endure the thought that they might have found him dead.
"If I had kept on, I'd be in Los Angeles now,—maybe in the navy already. I've a good notion to try again. I could almost go by train, now that my 'lowance has come. Mercy says it takes twelve dollars, and I've got ten. 'T any rate, I could ride as far as that would take me, and—by George, I b'lieve I could beat my way without spending a cent! That's the way tramps travel from city to city."
He winced at the idea of being classed with tramps, and fell to debating whether he would buy a ticket and ride like a gentleman as far as his ten dollars would carry him, or whether he would attempt the hobo's hazardous method of transportation. Before he had arrived at any satisfactory conclusion, he heard the tramp of feet close by, and the lively chatter of voices, and around the bend of the path came Toady with his six cousins. They did not see him at first, half hidden as he was by the heap of ragged rocks on which he lay stretched full length, but even when they did become aware of his presence, they merely glanced indifferently at the lazy figure and passed by without speaking.
Angered at thus being ignored and left out in the cold, Billiard resolved to display no interest in them, either, although he was consumed with curiosity as to where they were bound; but a chance remark of Susie's about being lowered in a bucket overcame his resolve, and he called after them, "Where you going, kids?"
"Don't you wish you knew?" Inez flung back with a saucy toss of her head.
"Up Pike's Peak," said Toady, without so touch as looking back.