AT THE DESERTED MINING CAMP
"Look at the buzzards sitting on that ridge of a two-story building, will you?" exclaimed Lanky, pointing as he spoke.
"There! They're off, flying," said Paul, "each starting with a queer little jump that sends the big bird up several feet before its wings begin to carry it. Always liked to watch turkey-buzzards roosting on a dead tree or dropping down to feed. Make me think of the clowns at a circus, they're so comical."
"I'd call this Camp Desolation, if you asked me," observed Frank, in an aside to his chums.
"Never did set eyes on its equal in all my life," Lanky admitted. "I reckon nobody's been around here for years, to look at the way those shacks and stores and huts have decayed."
"That's where you're away off your trolley then," chuckled Frank.
"Seen something, or you wouldn't talk that way," ventured the other, a bit annoyed because Frank had again beaten him at woodcraft, in which Lanky fancied himself a master.
"Lots of times, when we were climbing the canyon bed to top the rise," Frank told him, with a nod; "especially during the last half hour. Signs of horses coming and going—lately, too—little stones displaced, even the plain print of hoofs when there chanced to be a layer of earth to make them show. I'm a whole lot surprised that you missed them, Lanky."
"Huh! even the best scouts trip up once in a long time," grunted Lanky. "I must have been watching Jerry so closely and squinting up at the rock walls above, thinkin' about what a nice place it'd be for an old grizzly to make a den."
"There, you can see the tracks as plain as print right now," Frank at that juncture told his chums, pointing toward the ground just ahead.