“Peewit Patrol, troop six, of Philadelphia! I was a tenderfoot for six months; now I’m a second-degree scout—with hope of becoming a first-class one soon. Want to see my badge?” pointing to his coat. “Each patrol is named after a bird or animal. We use the peewit’s whistle for signaling to each other: Tewitt! Tewitt!”
Again the woods rang with a fairly good imitation of the peewit’s—or European lapwing’s—whistling note.
“Oh! I’d put a patent on that whistle if I were you,” snapped Leon sarcastically: “I’m sure nothing like it was ever heard in these—or any other—woods! We’d better be moving on or the mosquitoes will eat us up,” he added hastily. “There hasn’t been any frost to get rid of them yet.”
But as the quartette of boys left the log-camp behind and, with the terrier in erratic attendance, plunged again into the thick woods, it by and by became apparent to each that, so far as a knowledge of their exact whereabouts went or an ability to locate any point of destination, they were approaching the truth of Toiney’s words and wandering “lak wit’ eye shut!”
For a time they kept to a logging-road that branched off from the shanty, a mere grass-grown, root-obstructed pathway, over which, when that great white leveler, Winter, evened things up with his mantle of snow, the felled trees were drawn on a rough sled to some point where stood the movable sawmill.
The dense woods were intersected at long intervals by such half-obliterated paths; in their remote recesses lurked other rough shanties where a scout might read the “sign” that told of the hard life of the lumbermen.
But neither vine-laced road nor shanty was easy of discovery for the uninitiated.
“Whew! it kind o’ brings the gooseflesh to be so far in the woods as this without having the least idea whether we’re getting anywhere or not.” Thus spoke Coombsie at the end of half an hour’s steady tramping and plowing through the underbrush. “Are you sure that you know in which direction lies the cave called the Bear’s Den, Leon? A logging-road runs past that, so I’ve heard.”
“Oh, we’ll arrive there in time, I guess; Varney’s Paintpot is somewhere in the same direction as the cave,” replied the pseudo-leader evasively. “They’re some distance apart, but we’ve made a bee-line from one to the other when I’ve been in the woods with my father or brother Jim.”
But these woods were a different proposition now, without an older head and more experienced woodlore to rely upon: Leon, who had never before posed as a guide through their mazes, secretly acknowledged this.