“Whoo’! Whoo’! It’s me for that oak-tree!” he cried. “I’ll shin up that, right to the top and scour the horizon. ’Twill be easily climbed too!”
“See that freak pine with the divided trunk a little farther on? I’m going to climb that,” announced Leon Chase. “It’s a fine tree, if it is a freak—like the Siamese Twins.”
In another minute with the agility of a cat he had climbed to the crotch of the freak tree where its twin trunks divided.
“Look out! those lower branches are brown an’ rotten, Starrie. I wouldn’t trust to them if I were you!” shouted Colin, indicating the drooping pine-boughs about ten feet from the ground; he kicked a similar large drab branch, as he spoke, which had fallen and lay decaying at the foot of the freak tree.
“Right you are! I won’t.” Leon was a wonderful climber; twining his arms and legs round one olive-green trunk of the divided pine he managed to reach the firm boughs above through whose needles the late afternoon breeze crooned a sonorous warning.
The scout, meanwhile, had clambered like a squirrel nearly to the top of the splendid oak-tree. Presently the two boys upon the ground heard a shrill “Tewitt! Tewitt!” the signal-whistle of his peewit patrol, fully sixty feet above their heads, followed by Nixon’s voice shouting: “Can’t see smoke anywhere, fellows—or any sign of a real break in the woods. But there seems to be some sort of little clearing about two hundred yards from here, I should say!” He was carefully scanning the space over intervening tree-tops with his eye, knowing that if he could judge this distance in the woods with approximate accuracy it would count as a point in his favor toward realizing the height of his ambition and graduating into a first-class scout.
Leon, a moment later, was singing out blithely from the pine-tree’s top: “I see that gap between the trees too, just a little way farther on. I guess it’s a logging-road at last—probably a shanty as well—the road will lead somewhere anyhow. Hurrah! We’ll be out o’ the misery in time. Race you down, Nix?” he challenged exuberantly at the top of his voice.
Then began a swift, racing descent, marked on Leon’s part by the touch of recklessness that often characterized his movements; he was determined that though the boy scout might excel him in certain points of knowledge, he should not outdo him in athletic activity.
“There! I knew I could ‘trim’ you anywhere—in a tree or on the ground,” he cried all in one gasping breath as—caution to the winds—he stepped on one of the lower dead boughs which he had avoided going up.
It snapped under his hundred and twenty-five pounds of sturdy weight, like a breaking twig. He crashed to the ground, alighting in a huddle upon the decayed branch, the crumbling wind-fall, at the foot of the tree.