“He told me he’d bring me and show me,” said Jeffrey, “and that we’d stay here and catch fish and I could send my pigeons back to James—he’s our chauffeur—and I’d get better so’s I could remember things better. Do you think you get better living in the woods?”
“Surest thing you know,” said Garry.
The picture of the kindly old gentleman, bringing his none too robust nephew to this lonely spot, which lingered in his memory perhaps as the scene of woodland sports of his own boyhood, touched the four boys and seemed to bring them in closer sympathy with the figure that lay prone and motionless within the little shack.
“I can have anything I want,” Jeffrey told them again. “Spotty cost fifty dollars, but he died. That’s because I was sick and my brain didn’t work good. My other carrier cost thirty dollars and I sent him to James to tell him the governor was hurt.”
The scouts told him the fate of the pigeon and of how they had received the message.
“But we’ll never get away from here,” Jeffrey said hopelessly. “We’ll never find our way back.”
With the first light of dawn Garry increased the dying blaze and sent the smudge signal. Piling damp leaves on the fire he caused a straight thin column of thick smoke to rise high into the air and by inverting the deserted pigeon coop over this, and removing and replacing it as the Morse code required, he imprinted against the vast gray dawn the words
COMING HAVE DOCTOR
They knew well enough that some one in the camp would keep sleepless vigil, watching for just such a message. Three times the words were spelled out in smoke to make sure that they would be caught and understood.
To Jeffrey, whose only resource had been his pet pigeon and who had been unnerved by his inability to find his way from the hill, the sending of this message and the quiet orderly preparations for departure which followed were the cause of gaping amazement. He clung to Garry, as the others got his uncle onto the stretcher, and walked along at his side, plying him with excited questions. Sometimes it was necessary for him to take a corner while one of the scouts went ahead to open a way and then his panic was pitiable.