“What do you know about that?” demanded Jimmie.
“I suppose,” Jack complained, “that we’ve been eating a picked-up supper within a few rods of a farmhouse, or cattle ranch!”
“You might pry open some of the rocks back there,” Pat observed, with sarcasm, “and see if you can find the house you speak of. It was a human throat that crow came from.”
“Sure it was!” cried Jimmie. “It was a Boy Scout call. Now just see me get him to talking.”
“What’s a Rooster patrol chap doing here!” asked Jack. “I guess we are all having bad dreams.”
Jimmie did not reply. Instead he put his hands to his throat and in a second a long snarling wolf cry came forth, rising into a shrill call, as if summoning a pack at a distance.
“We’ll see what he knows about that,” the boy said.
As they listened the challenge of the chanticleer came once more. This time Jack answered it with the growl of a black bear, which seemed to Frank to be a great improvement on his practice stunts in the Black Bear Patrol club rooms in New York.
This odd exchange of greetings kept up for some moments, and then the figure of a boy of perhaps seventeen was seen in the uncertain light, making slow progress down the mountain, a short distance to the north. He carried a haversack on his shoulders and was dressed in the khaki uniform of the Boy Scouts of America.
“He must be used to mountain work,” Jack remarked, as the boy leaped lightly from ledge to ledge and finally dropped into the valley. “I couldn’t do that, even in broad daylight, to save my life!”