“I should think you’d had enough of the snow line at the Devil’s Punch Bowl!” Frank laughed.
“That wasn’t the real snow line,” Ned replied. “It was pretty cold up there, it is true, but still we didn’t get to the real thing.”
“I should like very much to go with you,” Mr. Bosworth suggested, “only my time is limited, and I really must investigate this mine about which so much has been said.”
The result of this conversation was that Frank, Jack and Norman started away with Mr. Bosworth, leaving Harry and Gilroy at the camp, while Ned turned straight west and pointed for an elevation which seemed to be something like 10,000 feet above sea level.
The boy’s days and nights for a long time had been filled with adventure, and now he was more than pleased to be away from all hostile influences. The way was not difficult for a time, and he walked along taking great draughts of mountain air and feasting his eyes on the wonderful landscape to the east.
About three o’clock in the afternoon he came to a cliff from which, through a break in the chain of mountains, he could look out toward the Pacific. The slope toward the sea was more gradual there, and the boy gazed over valleys in the great chain with feelings of awe in his heart.
As he stood on the cliff looking out to the west, he caught sight of an eagle perched on a crag not far above him.
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” the boy thought, “to take back an eagle as a trophy. Boy Scouts as a rule,” he reasoned with himself, “are not supposed to take the life of any wild creatures for their own amusement or benefit. Still, I never saw anything about an eagle that looked very patriotic, or very much in touch with the softer side of animal life. The eagle, notwithstanding its prominence on the American dollar, is merely a bird of prey, eating its game alive and killing out of pure viciousness.”
The great bird finally left the crag and swung nearer and nearer to the place where Ned stood. The boy crouched down behind a boulder and watched it with no little interest.
“I don’t suppose it is the right thing to do,” Ned mused, as he drew his automatic revolver, “but I just naturally want that eagle in the Boy Scout club room in New York. The boys of the Eagle Patrol would greet him with an ovation which he will never receive while alive.”