“I guess as haow they thort we’d hev tew make off a long distance away frum the camp tew fight the fire; an’ then they’d hev plenty o’ time tew clean her aout; but yeou see, we didn’t get fur away ’tall, so they hed all ther work fur nawthin’. But them tracks was as plain as anything, wa’n’t they, Eli?” Jim went on.
“They be,” was the conclusive testimony of the older guide; and every one of the scouts understood that Eli had set the seal of his approval on all that Jim had said.
It was certainly very unpleasant to realize that they were objects of desire on the part of even a pair of unscrupulous scamps, granting that big Cale Martin had retired from the combination. The boys seemed to get more indignant the longer they discussed the situation.
There was Bumpus, usually so mild and peaceful, fairly palpitating with a desire to draw a bead upon those two unprincipled rascals.
“We don’t stand for much nonsense from outsiders, do we fellers?” he appealed to the other five. “Once before on this trip some bad men thought to get fresh with the Silver Fox Patrol. You all know what happened to Charley Barnes, the leader of that bunch of yeggs that broke into the bank. Didn’t we make the capture though, and astonish Sheriff Green? And ain’t we going to get ever so much money for recovering the stolen stuff? Well, that’s what’s going to happen to those husky chaps if they get too gay with us. They’d better go slow. If they can read, they’ll see we’re marked ‘dangerous, handle with care!’”
“Yes,” said Giraffe, “we’ll just have to get busy, and hand these sillies over to the head game warden. They’re trying to interfere with our having the time of our lives up here in Maine; and we don’t stand for anything like that.”
None of them felt like getting back to their blankets in a hurry, after all that scare; so they just sat there around the fire, some of them with the blankets thrown over their shoulders, and compared notes all along the line; for what the guides had just told concerning the scheme of the unprincipled poachers filled the scouts with both indignation and anger.
And more than one of them resolved that when his time came to watch, he would make sure to keep a loaded gun close to his hand, to be used to give the prowlers the fright of their lives.