“Hey, Ted,” his chum had challenged him that day, “did you ever see a pirate?”
“Don’t know as I did,” admitted the ranch boy.
“Then I’ll show you one. Climb in,” and he prepared to search once more for the Mexicans.
“Show me one! You speak as if they kept them in museums.”
“This pirate will be a river. A river pirate,—I mean a pirate river! If I could find the divide just North of Muah Mountain I’d show you where streams are being captured this minute. Cottonwood Creek has already captured one of the tributaries of Mulkey Creek, I hear, and diverted it into an eastward flow, and further captures are likely to be pulled off any time. Isn’t it a scandal?”
“I say, Ace,” protested his chum, “I’ve swallowed a lot since we started on this trip, but I’m not so gullible as you seem to think.”
“Look here, old kid,” said Ace seriously. “It’s a fact. Along a divide, a stream flowing one way will divert one flowing the other way into its own channel.”
They found a pirate river,—but still no trace of the incendiaries. However, that merely determined the Senator’s son the more.
That night Norris told them the long promised tale of his Alaskan trip.
“Nothing like the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes has ever been seen by the eye of man,” he declared. “If we could take all the other volcanic regions of the world to-day and set them down side by side, they would present less of a spectacle, except, of course, at the time of a dangerous eruption. There has been nothing like it in the memory of man,—though geologists can read from the rocks that such conditions must have existed in past ages. The Mt. Katmai eruption of 1912, one of the most dangerous in history, first attracted attention to this region, and the National Geographic Society has since sent various expeditions to Alaska. It was that way that the Valley came to be discovered, in 1916.