“You’re a runaway bear,” Alex whispered to the cub, “and I ought to send you back, but I’ll just see if you know how to behave in the kind of society I am going to mix with. Will you be good?”
Teddy declared in his best bear talk that he would be good, and the boy and the cub lay in the thicket, still listening, for a long time before moving. Then Alex crept toward the campfire.
When he came to a considerable rise in the center of the ground between the two streams, he found that the ground was broken and rocky. It seemed to him that a great crag had formerly risen where he stood, and that some distant convulsion of nature had shattered it.
To the south, between the rivers and at no great distance from the egg-shaped peninsula, ran a long, rocky ridge. Making his way to this, he secreted himself in the shadow of a boulder and settled down to watch and listen.
After a time Teddy grew impatient at the inactivity thus forced upon him, and began moving restlessly about.
“Bear!” warned Alex, “if you make any more racket here, I’ll send you back to the boat. We’re supposed to be sleuthing!”
Teddy evidently did not like the idea of being sent back to the boat, or of keeping still either, so he almost immediately disappeared, notwithstanding Alex’s efforts to detain him by main force. The boy called to him in vain.
“Now,” thought Alex, “the cub has gone and done it! He’ll thrash around in the woods and scare my outlaws away. I wish I had tied him up on the boat. I might have known he would make trouble.”
The boy waited a long time, but the cub did not return. Now and then he could hear him moving about in the thicket.
“He’s just laughing in his sleeve at me!” complained the boy. “I wish I had hold of him!”