“What could be sweeter?” Ed Carlyle asked.
The foregoing is a fair sample of the kind of banter that had passed back and forth between Mr. Wilde and the boys ever since they had struck up an acquaintance. They had told him all about scouting, tracking, signaling and such things, and he had derived much idle entertainment in poking fun at them about their flaunted skill and resourcefulness.
“I’d like to see some boy scouts up against the real thing,” he said. “I’d like to see you get really lost in the mountains out west here. You’d all starve to death, that’s what would happen to you—unless you could eat that wonderful handbook manual, or whatever you call it, that you get your stunts out of.”
“We eat everything,” said Westy.
“Yes?” laughed Mr. Wilde. “Well, I’m pretty good at eating myself, but there’s one thing I can’t swallow and that’s the stories I hear about scouts saving drowning people and finding kidnapped children and all that kind of stuff. You kids seem to have the newspapers hypnotized. I read about a kid that put out a forest fire and saved a lot of lives at the risk of his own life. How much do you suppose the scout people pay to get that kind of stuff into the papers?”
“Oh, vast sums,” said Warde.
Mr. Wilde contemplated the three of them where they sat crowded on the Pullman seat opposite him. There was great amusement twinkling in his eyes, but approval too. He did not take them too seriously as scouts, real scouts, but just the same he liked them immensely.
“I bet you’ve been to the Yellowstone a lot of times,” said Ed Carlyle.
“Oh, a few,” said Mr. Wilde. “I’ve been up in woods off the trails where little boys don’t go—without their nurse girls.”
“I’ve heard there are bandits in the park,” said Westy.