The smoke was lifting above the timber away off, below. This was a fine morning; a Sunday morning, peaceful and calm, and the smoke rose in a little curl, as if it were from a camp or a chimney. I took that as a good omen. Down I sprang, to my own fire; and heaped on damp stuff and dirt, and using my coat made the private smoke signal of the Elk Patrol: one puff, three puffs, and one puff. (Note 44.) But the other smoke didn't answer.
Then I thought of making the signal meaning "I am lost. Help"; but I said to myself: "No, you don't. You're not calling for help, yet. You'd be a weak kind of a Scout, to sit down and call for help. There's a sign for you. Maybe that smoke is the beaver man. Sic him." And trampling out my own fire, and stuffing the flags into my shirt and tying my jacket around me, lining that other fire by a dead pine at the foot of the hill, away I went.
When I got to the dead pine I drew another bee-line ahead as far as I could see, with a stump as the end, and followed that. But this was an awful rough, thick country. First I got into a mess of fallen timber, where the dead trunks were criss-crossed like jackstraws; and they were smooth and hard and slippery, and I had to climb over and crawl under and straddle and slide, and turn back several times, and I lost my bee-line. But I set my direction again by the sun on my face. Next I ran into a stretch of those small black-jacks, so thick I could scarcely squeeze between. And when I came out I was hot and tired, I tell you!
Now I was hungry, too, and thirsty; and I found that fire meant a whole lot to me. If it didn't mean the man with the message, it meant food and somebody to talk to, perhaps. The fallen timber and the black-jack thicket had interfered with me so that I wasn't sure, any more, that I was heading straight for the fire. Down into a deep gulch I must plunge, and up I toiled, on the other side. It was about time that I climbed a tree, or did something else, to locate that fire. When next I reached a ridgy spot I chose a good pine and shinned it. From the top nothing was visible except the same old sea of timber with island rocks spotting it here and there, and with Pilot Peak and the snowy range in the wrong quarter again.
Of course, by this time the breakfast smoke would have quit. That made me desperate. I shinned down so fast that a branch broke and I partly fell the rest of the way along the trunk, and tore my shirt and scraped a big patch of skin from my chest. This hurt. When I landed in a heap I wanted to bawl. But instead, I struck off along the ridge, keeping high so that if there was smoke I would see it, yet.
The ridge ended in another gulch. I had begun to hate gulches. A fellow's legs grow numb when he hasn't had much to eat. But into the gulch I must go, and so down I plunged again. And when almost at the bottom I smelled smoke! I stopped short, and sniffed. It was wood smoke—camp smoke. I must be near that camp-fire. And away off I could hear water running. That was toward my left, so probably the smoke was on my left, for a camp would be near water. It is hard to get direction just by smell, but I turned and scouted along the side of the gulch, halfway up, sniffing and looking.
The brush was bad. It was as thick as hay and full of stickers, but I worked my way through. If the camp was the camp of the beaver man with the message, I must reconnoiter and scheme; if it was the camp of somebody else, I would go down; and if I didn't know whose camp it was, I must wait and find out.
The brush held me and tripped me and tore my trousers and shirt, and was wet and hot at the same time. Keeping high, I worked along listening and sniffing and spying—feeling for that camp, if it was a camp. Pretty soon I heard voices. That was encouraging—unless the beaver man had company. The brush thinned, and the gulch opened, and I was at the mouth of it, with the water sounding louder. On my stomach I looked out and down—and there was the place of the camp, at the mouth of the gulch, where the pines and spruces met a creek, and two boys were just leaving it. They had packs on their backs, and they were dressed in khaki and were neat and trim.
Down I went, sliding and leaping, head first or feet first, I didn't care which, as long as I got there in time. The boys heard and turned and stared, wondering. With my hands and face scratched, and my chest skinned and my shirt and trousers torn, bearing my bow and my broken arrow, like a wild boy I burst out upon them. Then suddenly I saw on the sleeves of their khaki shirts the Scout badge. My throat was too dry and my breath was too short for me to say a word, but I stopped and made the Scout sign. They answered it; and they must have thought that I was worse than I really was, because they came running.
"The Elk Patrol, Colorado," I wheezed.