“Ginger!” he thought. “I don’t know how he ever got there, whoever he is. Climbing that mountain is like trying to shin up the wall of a barn, but if he can do it, so can I, but ’twould take me a day, and it’s too late now.”
The boy looked toward the west, and saw the sun was low in the horizon. “I’d go to-morrow, but Dixie wouldn’t like it if I cut school, and I’d ought to stick at arithmetic if I’m going to be a civil engineer. But I’ll come up here Saturday before sun-up, and if that camp’s over there then, I’m going to head for it, and if it’s who I think maybe ’tis— Aw—but, gee, it couldn’t be. Well, it’s somebody, and who it is I want to find out.”
“There wasn’t anybody there,” was the report he gave Miss Bayley the next day. “Whoever it was made the fire had moved on.” He said nothing of his plans, but it was very hard for the boy, yearning for adventure, to keep his mind on mathematics that week, and Saturday was a long time coming.
But come it did, and hours before the sun was up Ken was on the trail, eager, expectant.
Again on the top of the trail where the burnt-out camp-fire had been discovered, Ken scrambled to the peak of the highest boulder, and, with a heart beating like a trip-hammer, he pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes to shade them from the glare of the sun that was rising in a cloudless sky.
Would there be any sign of the camp on the mountains beyond, he wondered. Even as he looked he decided that whether there was or not, he would not return to Woodford’s without having further investigated.
At first the lad saw nothing but the dazzling golden light of the sun that was slowly rising higher, driving the gloom from the cañons, but, as he continued to gaze, faint and far he saw a thin column of smoke wavering uncertainly, and then suddenly drop down, to rise again a moment later, as though invigorated when fresh and more inflammable fuel had been added to the fire.
The lad scrambled down from his peak of observation and danced about as he shouted aloud, to the very evident astonishment of a squirrel near by: “He’s there! That is, somebody’s there, and, oh, if it should be— But I mustn’t get my heart set on that.”
Then he looked again to make sure that he had not been imagining. It might be mist or haze, but there it was, unmistakably rising in a straight, unwavering dark line against the gleaming blue of the sky. Then, as the boy watched, a breeze, wafting across the lake, waved the column of smoke.
“I feel sort o’ like an Indian trying to read smoke-signals,” he thought gleefully; “only, whoever made that fire isn’t trying to send messages to me. If it’s a bandit hiding there, he wouldn’t want any one to know where he is even. Gee, he might be a dangerous character! Maybe I’d better steal up soft-like so that I can make a good getaway without his knowin’ I’m about, if—”