"Shucks! Didn't mean to hit him—just shot to scare him!" declared Bud. "But we'll have to see about it now! Come on!" he cried, and he ran down the side of the reservoir to where he had left Sock, his pony, followed by Dick and Nort who also headed for their steeds.
"Hu!" grunted the Indian, as he came on down more leisurely. "No water—man shot—new boys come—big time, mebby! Hu!"
And Buck Tooth was more than right. Big times impended in Flume Valley.
While Bud Merkel and his two cousins who had arrived from the east only the day before were mounting their ponies, to ride up the side of Snake Mountain, and seek the man Bud had shot, I shall have a chance to tell my new readers something about the boy ranchers, and the volume that immediately precedes this one.
The book is entitled "The Boy Ranchers; or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X." Norton, or Nort, and Dick, or Richard, Shannon were sons of Mr. and Mrs. Thornton Shannon, and their home was in the cast. When Mr. Shannon, the summer previous, had been obliged to make a trip to South America, with his wife, he sent his sons to spend their vacation at Diamond X, one of the western cattle ranches owned by Henry Merkel, Mrs. Shannon's brother.
Almost immediately on their arrival Nort and Dick, who were then rightly classed as "tenderfeet," became involved in a strange mystery. A call for help came, and they took part in the rescue of two college professors who had been attacked by a band of Mexicans and "Greasers," the latter being a low-class Mexican.
The professors were rescued, but the mystery only deepened. What it was, and how it came to be solved, you will find set down at length in the first volume. Sufficient to say, here, that Nort and Dick, as it were, "cut their eye teeth," during the exciting experiences that followed their arrival at Diamond X.
The eastern boys learned how properly to ride a pony cowboy fashion, they learned the use of the branding iron, the lariat and "gun," as the .45 revolvers were universally called. They learned, also, how to "ride herd," "ride line" and how to live in the open, with the prairie grass for a bed and the star-studded sky for a blanket, their saddle forming the pillow.
Mr. Merkel, Bud's father, owned several ranches besides Diamond X, so named because that brand was used on the cattle from it. He had Square M, and Triangle B, the explanation of which names are obvious.
When it came time for Nort and Dick to return east, as winter approached, they left, promising to return as soon as their summer vacation should arrive, for they were determined to become boy ranchers in earnest, an ambition in which Bud shared.