“I don’t smell it now,” I said; “I did a little while ago.”
“Wait till the breeze is this way,” Harry said.
And then, in just a minute we got a good whiff of it—strong, just like when I burned the leaves on our lawn at home. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t smell it at all. Dorry tied his scout scarf on a stick and held it up, and when it blew out straight we got a strong whiff, and the crackling was louder. Sometimes it blew around the other way, up the mountain. Sometimes we couldn’t smell anything at all, but mostly we could hear the crackling a little. It was too dark to see any smoke and there wasn’t any blaze. Harry said he guessed it was pretty far away. He said the breeze could carry the smell a long distance.
“It couldn’t carry the sound so far, though,” I said.
“Trouble is, a stiff breeze can carry most anything,” Harry said; “well, let’s move along and rescue the maidens.”
Just then Hunt Manners said, “Listen!”
Far off we could hear the whistle of a locomotive and a kind of rattling, not very clear, but I knew it was the rattling of a train.
“That’s ’way over at the Hudson,” Harry said; “shows you how far sound will carry in the night.”
Just then I looked at Dorry’s scarf that was tied on the stick, and I saw it was blowing the way we were going—up the mountain.
I said, “That’s why we hear the train; the breeze is blowing from the east. But I can’t hear the crackling now.”