We went to the packs and the Red Fox Patrol Scouts slung them on. They wouldn't let me carry one. We didn't know exactly what to do, now: whether to go on and wait, or wait here, while we watched. Only—
"You Scouts take the trail for your rendezvous," I said. Rendezvous, you know, is the place where Scouts come together; and these two boys were on their way to meet the rest of their party, for Salt Lake and the Yellowstone, when I had come in on them.
"No," they said; "your trail is our trail. Scouts help each other. We can meet our party somewhere later, and still be in time."
Scouts mean what they say, so I didn't argue, and I was mighty glad to have them along. We decided to follow the trail we were on for a little way, and then to climb the side of the gulch and make Sunday camp where we could watch the man's movements.
We passed the dug-out; up back of it the beaver man was tying his bandanna handkerchief around his leg! He didn't look at us, and he hadn't touched the first-aid stuff on the rock.
As we hiked on, I kept noticing that smell of smoke—a piny smoke; and it did not come from the dug-out, surely. Now I remembered that I had been smelling that piny smoke all day, and I laid it to the two camp-fires, but I must have been mistaken. Or else there was another fire, still—or I had the smell in my nose and couldn't get it out. When you are in the habit of smelling for something, you keep thinking that it is there, all the time. A Scout must watch his imagination, and not be fooled by it.
We climbed the side of the gulch, through the trees; the Red Fox boys carried their packs right along, without resting any more than I did. They were toughened to the long trail. The sun began to be clouded and hazy. When we halted halfway up, and looked back and down, at the dug-out, the man had hobbled across from the dug-out and was leading back his horse.
Just then Scout Ward spoke up. "It is smoke!" he exclaimed, puffing and sniffing. "Boys, it's a forest fire somewhere."
So they had been smelling it, too.
I looked at the sun. The haze clouding it was the smoke!