"It's the kind of thing I'd have done myself when I was his age," he reflected. "I can't blame Rube. But I ought to have stopped him from going when I saw that there was rain coming on and saw the mist gathering on the hills. Pity we didn't bring the hound with us after all. Sheila would sure have found him."
Fearing that he might yet have to go out in search of the boy, he cooked his own supper. He had already packed all his stores under the shelter of the wigwam and the canoe, covering the latter with the ground-sheet. He had also lighted the hurricane lamp and suspended it from the top of the totem pole.
He ate his supper in the teepee, but more than once got up from the solitary meal to open the door-flap and look out searchingly in the darkness for signs of Rube.
Towards midnight the light of the moon behind the clouds lessened the surrounding darkness. He could dimly distinguish the mountain ridges, outlined against the sky. The rain had ceased. The mist had lifted from the heights; but it still hung in fantastic layers between the walls of Lone Wolf Cañon.
"If it's only the fog that's kept him, he ought to be back in camp within another hour," he told himself, as the moon broke through a rack of drifting clouds.
He waited for a while, and then renewed his whistling, sending messages in the Morse code, which Rube very well understood.
But no answer came; only the repeated echoes of his own shrill whistle.
An hour went by, and yet another hour.
"Rube's wise in his way," Kiddie meditated. "I guess he's having a sleep up there rather than risk his neck by climbing down that precipice in the dark. There's no moonlight deep down in the cañon. Quite right of him to wait until sunrise."
Thus arguing, Kiddie entered the teepee, dropped the door-flap, and turned into his sleeping-bag.