He was formed of the same sort of material that those daring travelers and explorers who have done so much to add to the knowledge of the world are made of.
He would have been one of the first to climb the Matterhorn without a guide; to enter a newly-discovered cave; to go up in a balloon or down into a coal mine; to plunge into the depths of some unknown wilderness—in short, he was ready to undertake almost anything that was exciting or dangerous, but he wanted backing.
“Now I will mark this ravine so that we can find it again, and, bright and early to-morrow morning, we will begin our homeward journey,” said Bob, adding, when he saw the look of delight on George’s face, “Don’t shout until you are out of the woods, old fellow. We have a long and tedious journey before us; but you can’t realize the difficulties of it, because you have never lived among the mountains. This ravine looks as though it might take us somewhere, but it may lead us slap into a pocket.”
“What’s a pocket?” asked George.
“It’s a place in the mountains that you can’t get out of except by the way you came in. If this valley was walled in as solidly as we thought it was, it would be a pocket, and a bad one, too; for we could not possibly get out of it.”
Bob then went on to explain that a mountain stream is like a tree pressed flat, the only difference being that the branches do not cross one another. The tributaries are the branches, each one being a perfect tree in itself and leading to the parent stem.
It was perfectly safe, he said, for a tenderfoot to leave his camp alone and hunt up stream, so long as he did not cross any of the “divides” he found in his way; but if he went down the stream, the chances were that he would get lost when he tried to find his way back, for he would be almost sure to turn up one of the tributaries instead of following the main current. If he crossed a “divide,” and got into another system of ravine, he might wander about for weeks, and starve to death at last.
While Bob was speaking, he took the chains off the dogs, and marked the ravine by breaking a branch off an evergreen and leaving it hanging by the bark.
Then he and George went back to camp shooting three quails on the way, which, added to the two Bob had in his game-bag, made an excellent supper for them.
They sought their blankets at dark and enjoyed a good night’s rest, in spite of the fact that the geyser awoke them regularly every three hours by the discharges of its subterranean artillery.