“Good-bye, old feller! Come again when you can’t stay so long!” cried Giraffe, whose courage returned when he realized that his safety was assured.
But the bear did not have the remotest idea of abandoning his game.
“He smells our grub, that’s what!” called out Bumpus. “See him sniffing, would you? And there he goes, right at our stock of things. Oh! what if he gobbles it all up, whatever will we do, stranded away up here?”
“We’ve got to do something, boys, to chase him off,” declared Allan.
“If I had some powder up here, I’d show him,” declared Giraffe.
“What would you do?” demanded Smithy, who for once had not waited to pick out a clean tree, when he started to “elevate.”
“Why, I’d wet some powder, and make those sputtering ‘devils’ you remember I used to carry around with me. Then I’d get the old bear right under, put a match to a bunch of the powder, and when it took to sending out sparks to beat the band, I’d drop it on his back. Wow! but take my word for it, boys, he’d make tracks out of this in a cloud of smoke.”
“Well, suh, why don’t you do that, and help us out of a bad scrape?” demanded Bob White, whose hot Southern blood fairly boiled at the ridiculous idea of eight wide-awake scouts being made prisoners, by just one old bear.
“For several reasons,” replied Giraffe, calmly. “In the first place I don’t happen to possess a single match, even if I had the powder, which is not the case. And then again, I want to see how our sagacious and resourceful scoutmaster works his little game.”
This caused all the others to turn their attention toward Thad. For the first time they discovered that he was lowering a long piece of cord, with an open loop a few inches in diameter at the end.