No more orders were needed. The two Scouts, hurrying off, went across the clear space at the Scout pace, fifty steps running, then fifty steps walking. That is a better pace for fast travelling, except very short distances, than a steady run, for it can be kept up much longer without tiring, and Boy Scouts everywhere have learned to use it.
"Why do they call that Bald Mountain, I wonder?" said Pete, as they went along. "It isn't bald any more'n I am. There are trees all over the top."
"I don't know, Pete. Places get funny names, sometimes, just the same way that people do. It doesn't make much difference, though, in the case of a mountain."
"Nor people, either, Jack," said Pete Stubbs, stoutly. He had noticed a queer look on his chum's face, and he remembered something that he always had to be reminded of—the strange mystery of Jack's name.
He was called Jack Danby, but he himself, and a few of his best friends, knew, that he had no real right to that name. What his own real name was was something that was known to only one man, as far as his knowledge went, and that one a man who was his bitter enemy, and far more bent on harming him than doing him the favor of clearing up the mystery of his birth and his strange boyhood at Woodleigh. There Jack had lived in a cabin in the woods with a quaint old character called Dan. He had always been known as Jack, and people had spoken of him as Dan's boy. By an easy corruption that had been transformed into Danby, and the name had stuck.
He had come to the city through the very Troop of Boy Scouts to which he now belonged. They had been in camp near Woodleigh, and Jack had played various pranks on them before he had struck up a great friendship with one of them, little Tom Binns, and so had been allowed by Durland to join the Scouts. More than that, Durland had persuaded him to come to the city, and had found a job for him, in which Jack had covered himself with glory, and done credit both himself and Durland, who had recommended him.
"Gee, it's getting smoky," said Pete, as they reached the first gentle rise at the foot of the mountain, though it had seemed to rise abruptly when viewed from a distance.
"A woods fire always makes this sort of a thick, choking smoke. There's a lot of damp stuff that burns with the dry wood. Leaves that lie on the ground and rot make a good deal of the smoke, and then there's a lot of moisture in the trees even in the driest weather."
"Sure there is, Jack! They take all the water there is when the rain falls and keep it for the dry weather, don't they, like a camel?"
"That's a funny idea, Pete, comparing a tree to a camel, but I don't know that it's so bad, at that. It is rather on the same principle, when you come to think of it."