The Border Boys Across the Frontier | Page 8

give you a fight! Yep, big as you are, I ain't skeered
of you."
"Pete! Pete! Whatever is the matter?" gasped Jack, who, with the others,
was by this time on his feet.
"Matter?" howled Pete. "Matter enough. I do begin to think this place
shore is haunted, or suthin'. As I lay there, I felt suthin' tiptoeing about
behind me, and when I whipped suddenly round ter see if one of the
critters hadn't broken loose, what did I see but a great, big, enormous
thing, as big as a house, looking down at me. Afore I could say a word,
it was gone."
"Gone!" echoed the others. "What was it?"
"Wish you'd tell me," sputtered the cow-puncher, looking about him,
and still gripping his gun, "I never saw the like in all my born days."
"Well, what did it look like?"
"Hard to tell you," rejoined Pete. "It was as big as that." He pointed
right up at the moon.
"As tall as the moon? Oh, come, Pete, you had dropped off and were
dreaming," laughed Ralph.

"Who said it was as tall as the moon?" demanded the excited
cow-puncher angrily. "I only meant to convey to your benighted senses
some idee uv what it luked like."
"Well, how high was it?" asked Jack, in whose tones was a curious note
of interest, for a reason we can guess.
"About twenty feet, as near's I could judge. It had red eyes, that glared
like the tail-lamps of a train, and it spat fire, and it----"
"Whoa! Whoa!" laughed Walt Phelps. "Now we know it was a
nightmare, Pete. The dream of a rarebit fiend. You ate too much
crackers and cheese at supper."
"How was it we didn't see it?" asked Ralph, who had not spoken up till
now.
"Why, you were lying with your back toward the direction it came
from," explained Pete.
"An interesting optical delusion," declared the professor. "I must make
a note of it, and----"
"Wow! There it goes ag'in."
"Where? Where?" chorused the boys.
"Right off there! Look! Look!"
The lanky cow-puncher, fairly dancing about with excitement, pointed
out beyond the shadow of the solitary mesa. Sure enough, there were
three or four enormous, black, shadowy shapes, traveling across the
sands at a seemingly great speed.
"Get your rifles, boys!" yelled Jack.
The weapons lay handy, and in a jiffy four beads had been drawn on
the immense, vague shapes.

But even as their fingers pressed the triggers, and the four reports rang
out as one, the indefinite forms vanished as mysteriously as they had
appeared.
CHAPTER IV.
SOME QUEER TRACKS.
The hour, the surroundings, and the utter mystery of the whole affair
combined to make the sudden appearance and vanishment of the great
shadowy shapes the more inexplicable, not to say alarming. Small
wonder was it that the inquiring faces that turned toward each other
were a trifle whiter than usual.
"What do you make of it, Pete?" asked Jack.
"Stumped, by the big horn spoon!" was the expressive response.
"No doubt, some natural phenomena, with a simple explanation," came
from the professor. It was noted, though, that his angular form seemed
to be somewhat shivery as he spoke, and that his teeth chattered like
dice rattling in a box.
"Natural phe-nothings!" burst out Pete. "The things, whatever they was,
were as solid as you or me."
"How was it they didn't make any noise, then?" inquired Ralph,
practically.
"Waal, son, you jes' take a run on the bunchgrass, and you'll see that
you won't make no racket, nuther."
Ralph did as he was directed, and it was really wonderful how silently
he sped over the springy vegetation.
"Maybe it was somebody putting up a scare on us," suggested Walt,
rather lamely.

"They couldn't rig up anything as big as that," said Jack decisively,
"besides, there's another thing--I didn't tell you because I thought I
might have been mistaken, but I saw those same things this afternoon."
"What?" went up in a perfect roar of incredulity.
"Say, is this some kind of a josh?" asked Coyote Pete suspiciously.
"Never more serious in my life," Jack assured him, and then went on to
relate the strange experience that had befallen him when he had poked
his head out from under the saddle in the sand-storm.
"If they weren't so enormous, I should say they was horses," said Pete;
"but the biggest horses that ever growed never even approached them
critters--spooks, er whatever they are."
"There are giants among men," suggested Walt, "why shouldn't there be
giants among spooks, too?"
"You get to Halifax with that spook talk," said Coyote Pete scornfully.
"I'll bet my Sunday sombrero that whatever them things is, there's some
sore of human mischief back uv it. But what is it? Who put