"There's two of 'em," remarked Step Hen, "and they're men, I c'n see."
"Hello! there, don't shoot, we're friends, all right!" called a voice, so peculiar in itself that Toby immediately laughed aloud, as though he had no difficulty in recognizing it.
"Is that Sheriff Bob McNulty?" he asked.
"Nobody else," came the reply; "and unless I'm mighty far off my base, that must be my old friend, Toby Smathers, the forest ranger."
The two men came on to the fire. The boys saw that the one whom Toby had called Sheriff Bob was a tall, angular man, wearing the regulation wide-brimmed soft hat, and long black coat that sheriffs out in the Wild and Woolly West seem to so frequently think a badge of their calling.
He impressed them as a man of sterling character; but they did not entertain the same sort of an opinion toward his companion, who was a middle-aged man, lanky and sinister in appearance, and with a crafty gleam in his shifting eyes that somehow gave Step Hep and Davy Jones a cold feeling of distrust.
"Why, what's this mean, Toby; you a forest ranger camping with a parcel of kids?" exclaimed the sheriff, throwing a quick, interrogative glance toward his companion, which the other answered with a negative shake of the head, after giving each of the three boys a keen look, while a shade of bitter disappointment crossed his crafty face.
"Oh! it was an off season for me, Sheriff Bob," replied the guide, laughing; "an' I thought I'd try playing guide again, this time to a bunch of Boy Scouts what come out to the Rockies from the Far East, to hunt big game."
The sheriff grinned broadly, as though that struck him a good deal in the nature of a joke.
"Boy Scouts, eh?" he continued, as he calmly sat him down by the fire; "well, I've heard a heap about them, but these are the first I've set eyes on. They brought their nerve along with 'em I reckon, Toby?" and he chuckled again while speaking.