The flames ate fast into the dry faggots and the green boughs above made such a white smudge as had rarely been seen in that vicinity.
“There,” the boy mused, “there’s two towering columns of smoke! In Indian talk, they mean ‘I want some one to come and help me out of a mess,’ and that is what the two smudges say in Boy Scout language, too. Now I wonder if anyone save the lads at the camp will see and understand. I hope the kids at the cave will recognize this as an invitation to the bearer of the note alone, and not directed to themselves.”
The two columns of smoke ascended straight into the sky for perhaps ten minutes and then died down. Jimmie sat at the top of the rock and waited. The forest around him seemed alive with creeping and flying things, and sunshine filtered softly through the branches of the great pines. After a time he climbed to the top of a great tree and looked over the landscape.
To the south and west he saw the faint column of smoke lifting from the campfire. To the north and west mountain peaks lifted above the range, many of them white with snow.
“Now,” the boy mused, “unless the messenger is shut up, or tied up, or rendered motionless by the muzzle of a gun, I ought to know before very long whether he is a good Boy Scout or a renegade.”
CHAPTER V
THE CALL OF THE PACK
From his high perch in the tree Jimmie could see far above the timber line and clearly distinguish slopes, ledges and precipitous canyons invisible as a whole to one walking on the surface, or even one looking down from a high cliff on the mountains themselves. To the north a snow-covered summit glistened in the sun, the great white cloak unbroken at the top but showing bare spaces farther down.
Looking in wonder and awe at this magnificent manifestation of nature, Jimmie began to realize, dimly, that the lines of snow on the lower stretches of the mountain seemed to lie at one point parallel with each other. It was as if trenches had been dug in the form of a parallelogram and the excavations filled in with snow.
The outline was so distinct that the boy regarded it curiously for a long time. It seemed to him that the hand of the Snow King had sketched on the mountainside a plan for a structure which had never been built.
Just above the spot where this remarkable pattern lay was a precipice fifty or more feet in height. This wall seemed to the boy to be absolutely vertical. There was a shelf of rock below the strange snow-line, and beneath that the heavy slope of the range.