into sight, "What luck, Dick?"

"What do you know about this?" and Dick held up a fine string of
glittering fish. There were catfish, perch and two eels.

"Good; we won't go hungry," said Zeb. "Nothing better than fried eels
and catfish."

He greased the frying pan with a strip of bacon rind and then skinned
the scaleless catfish and eels as if he had been doing nothing else
all his life. Soon the savory odors of the frying with crisp slices of
bacon, and the aroma of coffee, filled the camp.

The boys were so busy setting out the tin cups and plates that it was
not till Zeb beat on a tin basin with a spoon to announce that the
evening meal was ready that anyone noticed that the professor was
missing. Night was closing in and the sky was overcast.

The boys began to worry. They set up a loud shout.

"Pro-fess-or! Oh, pro-fess-or!"

The little gulch rang with it. But no answer came.

"Now what in the world has happened to him?" frowned Jack. "We must go
and find him at once. He must have----"

[Illustration: Soon the savory odors of the frying with crisp slices
of bacon, ...filled the air--_Page_ 208.]

The sentence was never completed. At that instant Zeb set up a shout,
and a ton of earth and rocks, more or less, came hurtling down the
steep bank into the camp. The stones and dirt were mingled with
mesquite bushes and in the midst of the landslide was a figure that
they made out to be the professor.

Luckily, the avalanche had missed the camp-fire and the supper table,
and when they had extricated the professor, and brushed him off, the
boys learned that he had almost missed his way, and being
shortsighted, in the dark had walked right over the edge of the
steepest part of the arroyo instead of by a sloping path up above.

However, nothing was injured about him but his feelings, and since his
bag of specimens was intact, the man of science, after a few minutes,
was able to sit down and eat with as good an appetite as any of them.

Zeb proved himself a good weather profit. About midnight it started
raining, and such rain as the boys had never seen. It was not rain. It
was sheets of water. Even the waterproof tents began to leak, and the
fact that the trenches had been dug did not serve to keep the floors
dry, for the hard, sun-baked earth did not absorb the moisture, and
the downpour speedily spread half an inch or more of water over the
ground.

"Turn out! turn out!" shouted Dick, who shared one of the