“Jest what Fatty did ter us; he give us the biggest s’prise of our lives, Pierre and me. That’s the time we fooled ourselves. He caught us, all right, and I ain’t got no kick acomin’, ’less so be he wants to pay me back that way; which I don’t think’s goin’ to be the case, ’cause he’s too fine a feller to be revengeful like.”
“I want to shake hands with you again, suh,” said Bob White, the Southern boy, as he pushed up to Bumpus. “And right now let me take back everything I’ve ever said about your being a poor tenderfoot. I reckon, suh, a heap of the rest of us scouts’ll have to sit at your feet, and take a few lessons on how to do it.”
“A wild cat; a bear; and capturing a couple of—what are they, Thad, pirates, or just plain hold-up men? That’s going some for even a first-class scout. Just as Bob says, we take off our hats to you, Chum Bumpus, and now, while dinner is cooking, just gather around the fire and tell us the whole blooming story,” saying which Davy led the returned hero of the occasion to the seat of honor.
The story was all told over again, both during the eating of the meal, and afterwards. In fact it took almost two hours to get most of the facts out.
Then they concluded to hold the prisoners until the next morning, when they would be breaking camp, to head into the valleys of the Rocky Mountains, the tops of which reared themselves in great granite masses against the western sky.
“We’ll probably have a good enough time the rest of our vacation out here,” said Giraffe, later on, “but you can be sure we’ll never again see such a string of exciting adventures as fell to our lot, and that of Bumpus, when he was hunting through the big timber for a bear; and the rest of us searching for a lost tenderfoot scout.”
But Giraffe was really mistaken when he ventured to make this prophecy; for it was written that the members of the Silver Fox Patrol were to meet with still another series of mishaps and adventures before they left for home. What these were, and how cleverly Thad and his chums carried themselves under trying conditions, will be found set down in the pages of the next volume in this Series, now ready under the title of “The Boy Scouts in the Rockies; or the Secret of the Hidden Silver Mine.”
That very evening who should come along but Toby Smathers himself. He had been ranging through that section, really to find out what Hank Dodge and Pierre Laporte were doing; and seeing the camp had hastened to join the scouts feeling a longing for human company.
Thad liked the forest ranger right from the start, and was very much pleased when the other agreed to go with them as guide during the balance of the time they expected to spend in the Rockies—several weeks at least.
Toby Smathers gave the two men to understand that their every movement was being watched by agents of the aroused Government. The Interior Department was determined to put an end to timber stealing on a large scale by men who had grown enormously rich in the business.