“Traveled with them!” repeated Frank Shaw. “We couldn’t travel with them. We were fired—given the grand bounce—twenty-three sign. Ned seemed to want the space in the atmosphere we occupied at Missoula. Serve them good and right if they do get distributed over the scenery.”
“Never you mind about Ned Nestor and Jimmie McGraw,” Pat Mack put in. “They can get along all right if someone isn’t leading them by the hand. Suppose we fix up the camp and get ready for our eats?”
The boys turned away from the lip of the cañon upon which they had been standing and busied themselves putting up shelter tents and unpacking provisions and camping tools, as they called their blankets and cooking vessels.
They had passed the previous night in a sheltered valley lower down, sleeping on the ground, under the stars, and had breakfasted from the scanty stock of eatables carried in their haversacks. Early that morning a train of burros had landed their outfit at the end of a rough trail some distance below, and the boys, with long labor and patience, had carried it up to the plateau.
The men in charge of the burros had of course volunteered to assist in the work of carrying the goods to the place selected for the camp, but their offers had been declined with thanks, for the Boy Scouts were determined that for the present no outsider should know the exact location of their temporary mountain home.
Those who have read the previous books of this series[[1]] will not be at a loss to understand why the location of the camp in the Northwest was for a time to remain a secret, so far as possible. Ned Nestor, for whom those on the plateau were now waiting, had, some months before that hot August afternoon, enlisted in the Secret Service of the United States government.
Accompanied by Frank Shaw, Jack Bosworth, Jimmie McGraw and others, he had seen active diplomatic service during the Mexican revolution, had unearthed a plot against the government in the Panana Canal Zone, and had rendered signal service in the Philippines, where he had assisted in preventing an armed revolt against the supremacy of the United States government.
At the close of his service in the Philippines, he had been commissioned to investigate forest fire conditions in the Great Northwest. The boy had a wonderful native talent for detective work, and, besides, it was thought by the officials in charge of the matter that a party of Boy Scouts, camping and roving about in northern Idaho and Montana and in the southern sections of British Columbia, would be better able to size up the forest fire situation than a party of foresters or government secret service men.
So Ned and his four chums had sailed away from Manila, reached San Francisco in due season, and, after receiving further instructions and arranging for supplies, had headed for the frontier. At Missoula, Montana, he had sent Frank, Jack and Pat on ahead, after giving them the exact location of the future encampment and arranging for the transportation of supplies.
From the first there had been some mystery in the minds of the three concerning Ned’s strange halt at Missoula. They could not understand why he had sent them on ahead of him, for he usually directed every detail of their journeyings. When questioned concerning this innovation, Ned had only laughed and told the boys to keep out of the jaws of wild animals and not get lost.