Frank Merriwell, Jr.'s, Helping Hand; Or, Fair Play and No Favors

Title: Frank Merriwell, Jr.'s, Helping Hand; Or, Fair Play and No Favors

Author: Burt L. Standish

Release date: June 18, 2020 [eBook #62421] Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62421

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Les Galloway and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

The author has used the phrase ‘chip of the old block’ several times and the more usual ‘chip off’ once. This has not been changed.

BOOKS FOR YOUNG MEN

MERRIWELL SERIES

ALL BY BURT L. STANDISH

Stories of Frank and Dick Merriwell

Fascinating Stories of Athletics

A half million enthusiastic followers of the Merriwell brothers will attest the unfailing interest and wholesomeness of these adventures of two lads of high ideals, who play fair with themselves, as well as with the rest of the world.

These stories are rich in fun and thrills in all branches of sports and athletics. They are extremely high in moral tone, and cannot fail to be of immense benefit to every boy who reads them.

They have the splendid quality of firing a boy’s ambition to become a good athlete, in order that he may develop into a strong, vigorous, right-thinking man.

ALL TITLES ALWAYS IN PRINT

In order that there may be no confusion, we desire to say that the books listed below will be issued during the respective months in New York City and vicinity. They may not reach the readers at a distance promptly, on account of delays in transportation.

To be published in January, 1929.

209—Dick Merriwell, Universal Coach 210—Dick Merriwell’s Varsity Nine

To be published in February, 1929.

211—Dick Merriwell’s Heroic Players 212—Dick Merriwell at the Olympics

To be published in March, 1929.

213—Frank Merriwell, Jr., Tested 214—Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Conquests 215—Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Rivals

To be published in April, 1929.

216—Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Helping Hand 217—Frank Merriwell, Jr., in Arizona

To be published in May, 1929.

218—Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Mission 219—Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Iceboat Adventure

To be published in June, 1929.

220—Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Timely Aid 221—Frank Merriwell, Jr., in the Desert

Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Helping Hand

OR

FAIR PLAY AND NO FAVORS

By BURT L. STANDISH Author of the famous Merriwell Stories.

STREET & SMITH CORPORATION PUBLISHERS 79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York

Copyright, 1912 By STREET & SMITH

Frank Merriwell, Jr.’s, Helping Hand

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. Printed in the U. S. A.

5

FRANK MERRIWELL, JR.’S, HELPING HAND.

CHAPTER I. THE HOUSEBREAKER.

In one of the residence streets of Gold Hill, Arizona, stood—and no doubt still stands at this moment—a rather pretentious, two-story dwelling. Six low-growing, broad-leaved palms were marshaled in two rows before the front door, and to right and left of the palms were umbrella and pepper trees. Extending from one corner of the house, almost to the pickets that fenced in the premises, was a rank growth of oleanders.

This was the home of Colonel Alvah G. Hawtrey, an ex-army officer. In the service of his country Hawtrey had chased and fought the murderous Apaches all over that part of the Southwest; and now, at the age of sixty, the colonel, with an honorable discharge from the service, was giving his attention to various mining enterprises and was reputed to be a very wealthy man.

He was broad-minded and public-spirited, and the prosperity of Gold Hill owed more to the old colonel than to any other citizen. He had built the Bristow Hotel and several brick business blocks; he had founded a social club, a cattlemen’s association, and a miners’ relief society. It was known that he paid, out of his own pocket, the salary of one of the local ministers; he owned a bank, and, last but not least, he had organized and brought into successful operation the Gold Hill Athletic Club. For nothing was the colonel more honored than for his love of manly sports, and for his zeal in seeing6 that the youth of Gold Hill received proper physical training.

On a night in late October a spectral figure crept along the fence in front of Colonel Hawtrey’s house. The house was dark, and apparently deserted. After surveying the house carefully for a few moments, the figure leaped the fence noiselessly and gracefully and faded into the deep shadow of the oleanders.

Very carefully the prowler made his way through the bushes to the corner of the house. Here again he paused and listened. Seemingly satisfied that the coast was clear, he glided to the nearest window, opened the thin blade of a pocketknife, climbed to the sill, forced the blade between the upper and lower sash, and deftly opened the lock. Another moment and he had raised the lower half of the window and dropped through into the dark room beyond.

Evidently this prowler was not on unfamiliar ground. Without striking a light, he groped his way to a door and into a hall; through the hall he passed, and to a stairway, then up the stairs to the hall above, and down the corridor to a room at the rear of the house. He had a key to the door of the room, and he opened it. Once across the threshold, he scratched a match, stepped to an electric-light button, and touched it with his finger. Instantly the room was flooded with a glow of light from incandescent bulbs.

It was a small room, with banners and pennants on the walls. Several of the flags bore the letters, “G. H. H. S.”—official emblems of Gold Hill “High.” Others bore the initials “G. H. A. C.” and had once figured in athletic-club events. Foils were also crossed on the wall, boxing gloves hung from pegs, a catcher’s mask lay on a shelf, and a breast protector hung beneath it. On the same7 shelf with the mask stood a tarnished silver cup, bearing an inscription to the effect that it had been presented to one Ellis Darrel for winning a two-hundred-and-twenty-yard dash under the auspices of the Gold Hill Athletic Club. Dumb-bells and Indian clubs stood on the floor close to the wall.

Thick dust covered everything. The prowler stood in the center of the room as though in a trance, and slowly allowed his eyes to wander about him.

He was a young fellow, not much over seventeen, slender and with a body remarkably well set-up. His hair was light and curly, his eyes blue, and his face was handsome and winning, although clouded with melancholy and a certain haunting sadness.

The long, wavering survey of the room seemed to overcome the intruder. Suddenly he sank down into a dusty morris chair, bowed his head, and covered his face with his hands. As suddenly, he roused himself again, shook his shoulders as though to free them of a grievous burden, and made his way toward the door of a closet.

From the closet he removed a suit case, lettered with the initials “E. D.,” and followed with the address, “Gold Hill, Ariz.” Kneeling beside the bit of luggage, he opened it and took out a sleeveless shirt, a pair of running pants, and a pair of spiked shoes. A couple of cork grips rattled around in the suit case as he removed the other contents, but he left them, closed the grip, and returned it to the closet. Then he carefully closed the closet door.

Rolling his sprinting outfit into a compact bundle, the intruder rose to his feet and started for the hall door. On his way he paused. Below the cross foils hung a picture, turned with its face to the wall.

A flash of white ran through the lad’s bronzed cheeks.8 With his bundle under his arm, he put out one trembling hand to the picture and turned it around.

It was a framed photograph of a young fellow in running costume, taken on a cinder path. The lad in the photo was holding a silver cup—the same cup that stood on the shelf in that room. And it was more than evident that the youngster in the picture was the very same lad who had entered that house like a thief in the night, and was now staring at a kodak testimonial of a former track victory.

Why was the photograph turned to the wall? Why was the dust lying thick upon every object in the room? The cause was no mystery to the intruder. His lip quivered and a mist rose in his eyes as he turned the photograph to the wall once more.

He peered around to make sure that he had left nothing which might prove a clew to his presence in the room, then turned off the light, passed into the hall, and shut and locked the door behind him. As he had come gropingly to the upper floor, so now he felt his way down the stairs and to the opened window. To climb through the window and lower the sash from the outside required but a few moments.

He tried to relock the sash, but found it impossible. Hesitating a moment by the unlocked window, he turned finally and made his way through the oleanders to the fence; then, leaping the pickets as he had done before, he vanished along the gloomy street.

He had come from Nowhere, this mysterious lad who had come prowling by night into the house of Colonel Hawtrey; but he was going Somewhere, and, for the first time in months, he had a destination and a fixed object in mind. Although he believed that he had left9 no clews behind him, and that he had not been seen coming or going from the house, yet he was mistaken.

Some one, leaving the dwelling by the front door, had passed along the walk between the shadowy palms just at the moment the intruder was standing by the fence. At the very moment the prowler leaped the pickets, this other person was at the gate and had caught sight of the figure disappearing into the oleanders.

The person who had left the house repressed a cry of alarm and stood, for a few moments, leaning over the gatepost. It had seemed to him as though, in the starlight, he had recognized the form that had leaped the fence. A gasp escaped his tense lips, and it was plain that he was gripped hard with astonishment and dismay. While he stood there, slowly recovering control of himself, he heard muffled sounds from within the house; then, leaving the gate, he passed through the oleander bushes and found the open window. He was on the point of following the intruder into the house when a glow of light shone out from the second floor. Hurrying to a pepper tree that grew near a rear corner of the building, the spy climbed swiftly upward until he was on a level with the window through which came the light. The prowler had not drawn the shade, so all that went on in the upper room came under the eyes of the spy.

One look at the lad in the house, under the electric light, convinced the person in the tree that the prowler was really the one whom he had at first supposed him to be. The spy gritted his teeth and his hands clutched the tree limbs convulsively. When the intruder had left the house and vanished down the street, the spy came down from the tree, hurried around to the front door, and let himself into the building. Quickly he turned on the lights and made his way to the room, through the10 window of which the intruder had gained entrance into the house.

This room was the colonel’s study. A desk stood in the center of it, the walls were lined with books, and in one corner was a massive iron safe.

In the light it could be seen that this second youth was not more than two years the senior of the lad who had come and gone. But the face of this second youth was dark and sinister, and the puzzled light in his shifty eyes was gradually taking on a cunning gleam.

“What is he back here for?” he was asking himself, half aloud. “Just getting his old running suit, eh?” and there was something of a sneer in the voice. “There’s money in the safe, and I thought——” Just what the lad thought did not appear. A look at the safe showed it had not been tampered with. “Has he returned to soft soap the old gent and get back into his good graces? That’s what he has on his mind, and I’ll bet on it! He stole in here like a thief—just to get his old track clothes! I wonder——”

The youth paused, the cunning light growing in his eyes. On the floor, below the window, lay an open pocketknife. He picked it up and looked at it. On a piece of worn silver in the handle was marked, “E. D., from Uncle Alvah.”

“By Jupiter,” whispered the lad, “I’ll do it! Here’s a chance to cinch the situation—for me. I can make it impossible for that soft-sawdering beggar to get back into Uncle Alvah’s confidence. I’ll fix him, by thunder!”

Swiftly the schemer darted to the safe. Kneeling before it, he turned the knob of the combination back and forth for a few moments, and then pulled open the heavy door. The inner door was drawn out easily, and a package of bills, wound with a paper band and marked11 “$1,000” was removed. The boy hesitated, the package of bills in his hand.

“Hang it,” he muttered, “it’s now or never. There’s nothing else for it!”

With that, he pushed the bills into his pocket and got up.

“It will look like a clear case,” he went on. “The old gent will come here to-morrow morning, find the safe open, the window unlocked, the money gone—and Darrel’s knife on the floor! I’ll bet a row of ’dobies,” he added fiercely, “that will fix Darrel for good. What did he want to come back here for, anyhow? He ought to have had better sense. Lucky thing I had to run into town from Mohave Cañon, in order to fix up a scheme to knock Frank Merriwell out; and it’s lucky I was leaving the house and saw Darrel, and spied on him instead of giving a yell and facing him down. Oh, I reckon things are coming my way, all right! But Darrel—here! Who’d have dreamed of such a thing? There’ll be merry blazes when the old gent gets home to-morrow!”

Chuckling to himself, the plotter put out the lights, made his way to the front door, and was soon clear of the house and in the street. He had laid an evil train of circumstantial evidence, designed to benefit himself at the expense of Darrel.

12

CHAPTER II. A STRANGER IN CAMP.

Frank Merriwell, junior, and his two chums, Owen Clancy and Billy Ballard, were camping at Tinaja Wells with the football squad of the Ophir Athletic Club. Besides Frank and his friends there were fifteen campers in the grove at the Wells, enumerated by Ballard as one professor, one Mexican, one Dutchman, and twelve knights of the pigskin.

The professor was Phineas Borrodaile. He hailed originally from a prep school in the middle West, had come to Arizona for his health, and, aided by the two Merriwells, senior and junior, had found wealth as well. The professor was now being retained as instructor by young Frank and his chums, thus enabling them to keep up with their studies while “roughing it” in the Southwest.

The Mexican was Silva, the packer. Silva had a burro train, and had packed the equipment of the campers over the fifteen miles separating Ophir from Tinaja Wells. For ten miles the trail was a good wagon road; but from Dolliver’s, at the mouth of Mohave Cañon, up the cañon to Tinaja Wells, the trail was a mere bridle path, and only pack animals could get over it. Hence the lads had found it necessary to make use of Silva and his burros.

The Mexican had hired out as cook, as well as packer; but two days of Silva’s red-hot Mexican cooking, with garlic trimmings, made it necessary for the boys either to line themselves with asbestos or get another cook.13 Clancy was sent in to Ophir and he came back with Fritz Gesundheit, the Dutchman. Fritz had presided over a chuck shanty in the cattle country, and carried recommendations which highly extolled his sour-dough bread, flap jacks, and crullers.

Fritz was nearly as broad as he was high, but he proved a chef of rare attainments. He would roll around between the stove and the chuck tent, and play an errorless game in his cooking and serving; but let him waddle out of his culinary environment and he was as full of blunders as a porcupine is of quills. For a lot of skylarking boys, he was an everlasting joy and a perpetual delight.

Silva resented the loss of his cooking job. He burned to revenge himself on the fat gringo chingado who had kicked the red peppers and the garlic out of camp and preëmpted the culinary department. Less than an hour after Fritz had evolved his first meal for the campers and covered himself with glory, the Mexican’s dark plots came to a head. Placing the professor’s mule, Uncle Sam, between two clumps of cholla cactus, he smilingly invited Fritz to take a ride.

“Carrots,” as Fritz had instantly been christened by the lads on account of his hair, accepted the invitation and climbed to Uncle Sam’s hurricane deck. Thereupon the vengeful Silva twisted Uncle Sam’s tail with direful results. Carrots made a froglike leap over the mule’s head into one clump of cactus, and Silva, caught by the mule’s heels before he could get out of the way, sat down in another clump.

The campers were not long in finding out that Carrots was the subject of weird hallucinations. His latest delusion concerned buried treasure. It cropped out in the afternoon of his second day in camp. Merry had14 taken the football players out for a “breather”—down the cañon to Dolliver’s, and back. Silva was out with a shovel and hornspoon, somewhere in the hills, hunting a placer, and incidentally nursing his grievances. The professor was reading in the shade of a cottonwood. In the shade of another cottonwood, Carrots was mooning over a pipe of tobacco.

“Brofessor,” called the Dutchman, knocking the ashes out of his pipe and putting it carefully away in his pocket, “vill you told me someding?”

The professor looked up from his book and over his spectacles at Fritz.

“What is it that you desire to know?” he asked.

“Ask me dot.”

The professor showed signs of impatience.

“Simpleton! Am I not putting the query? What shall I tell you?”

“Py chiminy Grismus! Oof I know vat you vas to told me, for vy should I make der rekvest for informations?”

Borrodaile gave a grunt of disgust and hunted the shade of another cottonwood. Fritz was persistent, however, and followed him up.

“I hat a tream mit meinselluf der oder night, brofessor,” continued Fritz, coming up from behind, “und you bed my life it vas der keveerest tream vat I know. Iss treams someding or nodding? Tell me dot, oof you blease. Ballard, he say it iss; aber you know more as anypody, so tell me, iss it?”

“Go away,” said the professor severely; “you annoy me.”

“I peen annoyed like anyding mit dot tream,” went on Fritz, not in the least disturbed by the professor’s ill humor.15 “Dis iss der vay I ged it: Fairst, I valk along der moonlight in, mit der dark around, und I see a shtone mit a gross on der top. Yah, so hellup me, I see him so blain as nodding; und I pull oop dot shtone, und I tig, and vat you dink?”

“I am not interested at all in your foolish delusions!” came tartly from the professor. “If you have business anywhere else, do not let me detain you a moment.”

“Make some guesses aboudt dot!” persisted Fritz. “Vat you dink is der shtone under mit der gross on, hey? Shpeak it oudt.”

The professor, goaded to desperation, merely glared.

“Py shinks!” cried Fritz, “I findt me so mooch goldt dot shtone under mit der gross on dot I cannot carry him avay!” He leaned down and whispered huskily, his eyes wide with excitement: “Puried dreasure it vas, brofessor, so hellup me! Come, blease, und hellup me look for der shtone mit der gross on. Ven I findt me der dreasure, I gif you haluf.”

With an explosion of anger, the professor leaped to his feet, flung his book at Fritz, and dove head-first into a tent. Fritz turned away wonderingly.