"It is simply great up here!" Ned exclaimed presently. "That is the only word that seems to express it—great!"
"Yes, it is fine for a change," Frank admitted, "though I don't believe in the wilds as a permanent thing! Everything in the mountains and forests seems to me to be crude and half done. This, I presume, is because the world isn't finished yet. Those who come to places like this catch the Creator with his sleeves rolled up, if that isn't a coarse way of saying it."
"I like it, just the same!" Ned declared. "It is glorious! It is life!"
"It is healthful so far as animal life goes," laughed Frank, "but what about mental life? There would never have been anything wonderful in the way of inventions—like the wireless, and the telephone, and the uses of electricity—if mankind had been content to live and die in the wilds! It is crude, as I said before, unfinished, out of line with all the decrees of art. I'll take the city for mine, with its marble buildings, its wonderful art galleries, its beautiful parks!"
"Say, you mooners!" came a voice from the camp below, "if you've got done surveying the beautiful black landscape, suppose you come down to supper?"
The boys went down to the tent to find Jimmie and Teddy still absent.
"There are two things we'll have to set aside time for," Ned declared, as he took a seat on the ground before the blaze, with a great plate of food in his lap. "We'll have to arrange for keeping Uncle Ike, the mule, out of mischief, and for keeping track of Jimmie and Teddy. Those boys will get lost in the mountains yet, and go hungry for a few days. That would be punishment enough for Jimmie—hunger!"
The boys sat by the campfire a long time, heaping dry wood on the blaze until they were obliged to widen the circle about it. There was only the light of the stars, looking down from a cloud-flecked sky, but there would be a moon shortly after ten o'clock.
"If the boys don't return before long," Frank broke out, after a moment of silence, "I'm going to take a searchlight and go out looking for them."
The boy expressed the thought which was brooding in the minds of them all. They were more than anxious for the safety of the two truants. Oliver arose and walked away from the fire up the slope, until his figure was out of sight, but shortly came back and sat down again, his face expressing impatience as well as anxiety.