THE POISONED SPRING. All of them were staring at the little placard by now, even Adrian feeling almost as much astonishment as the kneeling Billie. Indeed, what they saw written there in a crude manner was quite enough to give the fat boy a cold chill. Underneath that plainly printed word “Warning!” was the following: “Don’t yu drink here, spring poizened by crazy Injun long tim ago. Dangrous. Go on further down vally, mor water.” There was no name signed, but just then none of the boys thought anything about that little fact. “What!” burst out the indignant Billie, “poisoned, this lovely spring? Now, ain’t that just too bad for anything? And so we don’t get a drink after all. But whatever d’ye think any Injun’d want to do such a mean thing as that for?” “Well,” remarked Donald, “I’ve heard something about this same spring, and that was why I warned you to go slow. Fact is, I expected we’d run across this before we came to the one that’s safe to drink from. But I tell you plainly though, I didn’t expect to find this kind warning stuck up here. The boys didn’t say a word about that. And as sure as you live, Adrian, I begin to believe it was put here _today_, and for our special benefit!” “Listen to that, now, would you?” burst out Billie, still staring hard at the paper in the cleft stick that had been pushed into the ground; “the mystery deepens, seems like. One night we have an unknown friend wounding an Injun that’s trying to make way with our ponies; and now here’s somebody mighty anxious that we don’t drink from this poisoned spring. It’s sure getting interesting, fellers; and I’d give a cookey to know who he might be, wouldn’t you?” But from the blank expression on the faces of his two chums, Billie realized that they were just as far from guessing the truth as he might be. “Then we don’t take the chances of having even a little drink here, do we?” the sorely disappointed fat boy asked, as he sat and looked regretfully at the water that was so tempting. “Better not,” decided Donald. “It might be only some sort of fake; but we can’t afford to take the chances, you see. Let somebody else experiment, if they want to. So long as there is another spring hole further down the valley, why, we’d better be trotting along. And just notice the way the ponies sniff the air, will you? I really believe they know that this water is bad to drink.” “What, ponies know better than human beings, do they?” demanded Billie, hardly relishing such a state of affairs. “They’ve been given an unerring instinct, where we depend on reason, and that often fails us. Just watch a horse feeding, and notice how he refuses to touch all kinds of weeds, and how a cow drops the same out of her mouth after she’s scooped in a whole bunch of grass. Instinct, and nothing else. But there’s no use in us hanging out here, when we can soon get to good water.”