“Three miles would take it below the mouth of the canyon—just about down to our present camp. Say, Dick—it’s up to us to get busy on this thing. I don’t like the look of it. Here; you hold the tape on this stake and stop me at fifty feet,” and he took the ring end and scrambled on up the canyon.
“You’ve got it,” Dick announced, when the fifty-foot mark ran out of the leather case. Then: “What do you find?”
“Nothing, yet,” was the answer; and Dick proceeded to reel in the steel ribbon, walking on up to Larry as he wound.
“Nothing” seemed to be right. The fifty-foot point was in the heart of a little thicket of aspens. Carefully they searched the grove, looking behind every boulder. But there was no stake to be seen.
Though they were both Freshman—new to the engineering game, they had already learned a few of the first principles. For example, they knew that staked “stations” in a survey were usually 25, 50 or 100 feet apart, according to the nature of the ground. Therefore, fifty measured feet from the point they had just left should have landed them either at Station 162 or Station 163, according to the direction in which the survey had been made. But apparently it hadn’t.
It was Dickie Maxwell who presently solved the mystery, or part of it. Crawling upon his hands and knees among the little aspens, he was halted by the sight of a bit of fine copper wire twisted about the trunk of one of the trees. A closer inspection revealed four knife-blade cuts in the bark; two running crosswise and half-way around the tree and the other two up and down on opposite sides of the trunk to complete a semi-cylindrical parallelogram.
“Come here, Larry!” he called; and when Larry had crept into the thicket: “See that wire and those marks?”
Larry saw and got quick action. Whipping out his pocket knife and cutting the thread-fine wire, he stuck the point of the blade into one of the up-and-down cracks. At the touch a section of the bark came off like the lid of a box, and under it, carved in the clean white surface of the heart wood, was the legend, “Sta.163.” Dick sat back on his heels.
“Larry, you old knuckle-duster, it’s rattling around in the back part of my bean that we’ve found something,” he remarked, with the cherubic smile that had more than once helped him to dodge a richly deserved reprimand in his school days. “Can you give it a name to handle it by?”
Larry Donovan, sitting on a rock, propped his square chin in his cupped hands and lapsed into a brown study. He was a rather slow thinker, unless the emergency called for swift action, but he usually battered his way through to a reasonably logical conclusion in the end.