“As the crow flies not more than thirty miles, perhaps,” Thad explained; “but the way things are upset here in Belgium, that stands for hard sledding.”
“Here’s the canal right now, after we cross the railroad,” ventured Giraffe, to whom it was all getting very interesting.
“But the sun is going down before a great while, you notice,” said Bumpus, because they had been held up for nearly two hours while Thad tinkered with that horrible engine again, and deemed himself lucky to get it started even then.
“Yes, and as we’ve settled on staying outdoors to-night,” said Allan, “let’s be on the watch for a decent place to make camp.”
“Just think of our having a chance to do that over here in Belgium, with battles going on all around us,” Giraffe remarked. “We’ll make those other scouts turn green with envy when we relate all our adventures on this trip. It was fine enough coming down the Rhine, but then nothing queer happened to us like we’ve been up against the last few days.”
A short time later they struck what looked like an ideal place for stopping overnight. Just here there were no houses in sight, though of course the boys did not know what lay beyond, perhaps a village or a town. Belgium is so thickly populated that very little ground is allowed to remain idle, or be planted in trees, but just here there was a strip of woods that had a most inviting look.
So the car was run in and they started to make themselves comfortable, as scouts of long experience might be expected to do when surrounded by similar conditions.
“I hope that when we’re just sitting down to supper, after cooking the same,” Bumpus remarked, pensively, “some old gruff Belgian farmer doesn’t come hurrying up, complaining because we’ve trespassed on his property, and making us clear out bag and baggage.”
To Bumpus that represented the sum total of depravity; it meant a catastrophe without limit, and something to cause a shudder, even in the bare contemplation; for it meant hunger, and that was always a calamity in his eyes.
“Not much danger,” Allan told him, “because you may have noticed I’m making this fire small, and out of extra-dry stuff. Scouts know that if you take green wood you’ll always get a smoke that can be seen far off. That’s what we use it for when we want to communicate by smoke signals. But Bumpus, if you were fifty feet away I don’t think you could notice smoke from this wood.”