Bill Peterson borrowed his older brother's gun and brought in two
rabbits the next day. The Boston boy, with an eye wide open to future
profits to himself, went with Peterson to the head gardener, and
holding up first one dead jack-rabbit by the ear, and then the other,
coolly and deliberately counted off four ears.
The gardener grudgingly counted out two dimes, and then, with a grunt
of satisfaction, carried away the two big rabbits by their long hind
legs.
As the weeks wore by, several other dead rabbits were reported, and
despite the grumbling of the head gardener, the tumultuous and merry
students had quite a revenue, and their hopes for the future were
high, especially when that artillery should arrive from Boston!
Meantime, the little brown Aztec boy had done nothing at all. However,
when Friday afternoon came, he earnestly begged, and finally obtained,
leave to go down to his home at Tia Juana. He wanted very much to see
his Mexican mother and his six little Mexican brothers, and his sixty,
more or less, little Mexican cousins.
But lo! on Saturday morning, bright and early, back came the little
Bear-Slayer, as he was called by the boys, and at his heels came
toddling and tumbling not only his six half-naked little brown
brothers, but dozens of his cousins.
Each carried a bundle on his back. These bundles were long, finely
woven bird-nets, and these nets were made of the fiber of the misnamed
century plant, the agave.
This queer looking line of barefooted, bareheaded, diminutive beings,
headed by the silent little Aztec, hastily dispersed itself along the
outer edge of the grounds next to the chaparral abode of the
jack-rabbits, and then, while grave professors leaned from their
windows, and a hundred curious white boys looked on, these little
brown fellows fastened all their long bird-nets together, and
stretched two wide wings out and up the hill.
Very quiet but very quick they were, and when all the nets had been
unwound and stretched out in a great letter V far up the hill, it was
seen that each brown boy had a long, heavy manzanita wood club in his
hand.
Suddenly and silently as they had come they all disappeared up and
over the hills beyond, and in the dense black chaparral.
Where had they gone and what did all this silent mystery mean? One,
two, three hours! What had become of this strange little army of
silent brown boys?
Another hour passed. Not a boy, not a sign, not a sound. What did it
all mean?
Suddenly, down came a rabbit, jumping high in the air, his huge ears
flapping forward and back, as if they had wilted in the hot sun.
Then another rabbit, then another! Then ten, twenty, forty, fifty,
five hundred, a thousand, all jumping over each other and upon each
other, and against the nets, with their long legs thrust through the
meshes, and wriggling and struggling till the nets shook as in a gale.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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