The Pony Rider Boys in the Alkali Part 15

"See those boys ride," laughed the guide, pausing in his argument on the wild-horse question: "I didn't suppose the fat boy could sit in a saddle like that."

"Oh, yes; he does well. You saw him master the bucker the other day in the mountains?"

"Yes, I remember. Whoa! Look out, there! There goes one of them! He took too short a turn."

"Walter's down!" cried Ned.

"Hope he isn't hurt."

"No; he's cleared all right. That was a mighty quick move the way he slipped out of that saddle. It would have broken his leg sure, if the pony had fallen on it," declared the guide.

Stacy had pulled up his own mount after making the turn safely. Then he rode slowly back.

"Hurt you any, Walt?" he asked.

"Jarred me a little, that's all. Why don't you go on and win the race?"

"Waiting for you," announced the fat boy laconically.

Walter swung into his saddle.

"Come on, then. Gid-ap!" he cried, shaking out the reins.

The two little animals sprang away like projectiles. But Stacy seemed not to be in his best form. He came in bobbing up and down, several lengths behind Walter.

"You won the race. I fell off," announced Walter, with his usual spirit of fairness.

"I guess not," drawled Stacy. "Now I'm going to do some stunts."

With that, the fat boy galloped out over the alkali again, riding off fully half a mile ahead of the party, where he jogged back and forth for a time, then began riding in a circle.

After a little they saw him toss his hat into the air ahead of him, and putting spurs to his pony dart under it, giving it a swift blow with his quirt, sending it spinning some distance away, at the same time uttering a shrill whoop.

"Thinks he's having the time of his life," grunted Ned.

"For a boy with a black eye, he is particularly cheerful, I should say," laughed Parry. "What's he going to do now!"

"Pick up his sombrero while at a gallop, I guess," replied Tad, shading his eyes and gazing off across the plain. "Yes, there he goes at it."

Stacy, with a graceful dip from his saddle, swooped down on the sombrero, scooping it up with a yell of triumph, then das.h.i.+ng madly across the desert to the westward.

All at once they saw his pony stumble.

"There he goes!" warned the guide. "He will break his neck!"

Down plunged the broncho, his nose sc.r.a.ping the ground, his hind feet beating the air wildly.

Stacy kept right on.

"The pony struck a thin crust on the alkali," explained the guide.

Almost before the words were out of his mouth Stacy Brown hit the desert broadside on. Then, to the amazed watchers, he seemed to disappear before their very eyes.

"He's gone! What does it mean?" cried the boys.

Where but a few seconds before had been a pony and a boy, there now remained only a kicking, floundering broncho.

Tom Parry put spurs to his mount and set off at top speed for the scene of the accident, followed by the others of the party strung out in single file.

CHAPTER VIII

NEARLY DROWNED IN AN ALKALI SINK

Tad rapidly drew up on the guide.

"What has happened?" Butler cried as the two now raced along side by side.

"As I said before, the pony went through a thin crust----"

"Yes, but Chunky--what happened to him?" asked Tad.

"He went through when he struck the ground."

"I don't understand it at all."

"You will when you get there."

Tad was mystified. The solution of the mystery was beyond him.

"If he isn't drowned, he's in luck," snapped Parry.

"Drowned?" wondered his companion.

They cleared the intervening s.p.a.ce that lay between them and the fat boy's pony in a series of convulsive leaps that the bronchos took under the urgent pressure of the rowels of their riders' spurs.

As they neared the scene Tad espied a hole in the desert, and began to understand. Stacy also had struck a thin crust and had broken through.

Yet what had happened to him after that, Tad did not know.

Both would-be rescuers leaped from their ponies and ran to the spot.

With his body submerged, his head barely protruding above the water, sat Stacy, vigorously rubbing his eyes to get the brown alkali water out of them sufficiently to enable him to look about and determine what had happened to him.

The rest of the party dashed up with loud shouts of alarm, hurling a series of rapid-fire questions at the guide.

Parry and Tad grasped Stacy by the arms and hauled him, dripping, from the alkali sink into which he had plunged.