“We haven’t,” said Warde.
“I mean even our watches and matches and things like that,” said Westy. “Just as if we didn’t even have any clothes; you know, kind of primitive.”
“Don’t you think I’d better hang onto my safety-pin?” Ed asked. “Safety first. An Indian might—you know even an Indian might happen to have a safety-pin about him.”
Westy could not repress a smile, but for answer he pulled his store of matches out of his pocket and scattered them by the wayside. Warde, with a funny look of dutiful compliance, did the same. Ed, with a fine show of abandon and contempt for civilization, pulled his store of matches out of one pocket and put them in another. “May I keep my watch?” he asked. “It was given to me by my father when I became a back-yard scout.”
“Back-yard scout is good,” said Westy.
“Thank you muchly,” said Ed.
“I mean all of us,” Westy hastened to add.
It was funny how poor Westy was continually vacillating between these two good scouts who were with him and that unknown hero whose prowess had been detailed by the engaging Mr. Wilde. He was ever and again being freshly captivated by Ed’s sense of humor and whimsical banter and impressed by Warde’s quiet if amused compliance with this new order of things by which it seemed that the primitive was to be restored in all its romantic glory.
It never occurred to Westy to wonder what kind of a friend and companion his unknown hero, Shining Sun, would really be. What he was particularly anxious to do, now that the chance had come, was to show that cigar-smoking Philistine, Mr. Wilde, that boy scouts were really good for something when thrown on their own resources.
Pretty soon the first simple test of their scouting lore was made when they took their bearing by that vast, luminous compass, the sun. It worked its way through the dull, threatening sky bathing the forbidding heights in gold and contributing its good companionship to the trio of pilgrims. It seemed to say, “Come on, I’ll help you; it’s going to be nice weather in the Yellowstone.”