CHAPTER XVII. IN THE CLUTCHES OF THE GRIZZLY. Blinky's conviction that the signaling had something to do with Rob would have been strengthened if he could have been so stationed as to watch the making of the first smoke telegraph Merritt noticed. On the distant hilltop Clark Jennings, Hank Handcraft and Bill Bender were stooped over a fire of green wood, alternately covering and uncovering it with a horse blanket. The signaling was being done under Clark's direction, as neither of the Easterners knew anything about the Indian smoke language. Clark, during his long residence in the West, had picked up his knowledge of it from Emilio Auguardo, the halfbreed who had once worked on his father's ranch. Through this man, too, he had become quite an intimate of the Moquis, as we have seen. "Douse it! Uncover it. Douse. Uncover. Douse. Uncover." Clark Jennings's commands came in regular rotation, with differing intervals between each order. In all essentials, those three enemies of the boys were using a telegraph code antedating by centuries the system in use to-day on our telegraph lines. "Ought to be getting an answer soon," muttered Clark, shading his eyes with his hand and standing erect on an upraised slab of rock, the better to command a view of the distant hills in the section in which he had reason to believe the Moquis had proceeded. "Hold on! Douse that fire!" he cried suddenly. Against the sky, not more than five miles distant, an answering thread of smoke had unrolled, like the coils of a slow serpent. Up it wavered and then stopped abruptly, to be followed by another puff. It was as if a locomotive lay beyond the distant hill. The puffs of smoke resembled the vaporous belchings of an engine stack when it is starting up. "They say for us to wait here and they will send a messenger," announced Clark finally. "Well, I guess we can wait as well as anything else," rejoined Hank Handcraft, extending himself lazily on the sun-warmed ground. "Are they going to send a pony?" "Don't know," rejoined Clark shortly. "Wonder what we'll do if Harkness hits our trail?" "Don't bother about that. He'll be too busy rounding up that boy Rob," replied Bill Bender. "Queer where that kid went to." "Queer is no word for it," agreed Clark; "and what bothers me is that we are likely to have trouble with him yet if we're not careful." "You think he is alive, then?" "Must be, unless he melted into thin air." "That's so." "By the way, Clark," struck in Hank Handcraft suddenly, after a period of deep thought, aided by the consumption of sweet grass stalks, "wouldn't the present time be a good one to drop in on Harkness's mavericks?"