"This doesn't appear so hopeful to me as it did last night, when we sat around the fire and talked it over; but of course we won't give up so long as there's the least hope."
"And it won't do for me to give him up then," replied Otto, with a meaning shake of his head; "you don't know my fader as well as me."
"I don't want to either," remarked Jack, who did not think it his duty to refrain from showing the contempt he felt for the miserly, cruel parent of his friend.
"No," observed Otto, with a touch of that grim humor which he sometimes displayed, "I doesn't dinks dot you and him could have much fun together."
The young friends were too accustomed to the immensity of nature, as displayed on every hand, to feel specially impressed by the scene which would have held any one else enthralled. It may be said they were "on business," though it had very much the appearance of sport.
"Halloo! I expected it!" called out Jack Carleton, whose gaze abruptly rested on a point due southwest, and more than a mile away.
His companion did not need the guidance of the outstretched arm and index finger leveled toward the distant spot, where the smoke of a camp-fire was seen climbing toward the blue sky. The scene on which the boys looked was similar to that which met the eye of Ned Preston and Deerfoot when they lay on the broad flat rock and gazed across at the signal-fire in the distance.
The wooded country gradually sloped to the south and west from the elevation whereon the young friends had halted, slowly rising and undulating until the eye could follow the blue wavy outlines no further. At the point already named, and in the lowest portion of the intervening country, a camp-fire was burning. The smoke, as it filtered upward through the branches of the trees, and gradually dissolved in the pure air above, was seen with such distinctness that it caught the eye of Jack the moment it was turned in that direction.
It was not a signal-fire, such as one is likely to detect when journeying through an Indian country, but the vapor from the camp of some body of men who were not making the slightest attempt to conceal themselves, for it cannot be conceived that they had any reason for doing so.
If the party were Indians, they surely had no necessity for stationing a sentinel on the outskirts of their camp to watch for danger.