CHAPTER XI.
BABES IN THE WOODS.
“One, two, three! All there!” whooped Jack Durham.
“We’re in great luck, fellows!” Hugh assured them, for truth to tell he had felt fear gripping his heart as with an ice-cold hand.
If they had failed to discover the children where Peter had left them after they could walk no further through the smoky forest, it would have been very much like looking for a needle in a haystack to have tried to find them. Following a trail by eyesight alone over that burned ground must have proved well-nigh impossible, even for practiced scouts.
But here were the children, ready and willing to be saved. Indeed, they were already stretching out their little hands entreatingly toward the boys, as though begging Hugh and his trio of chums not to forsake them.
Hurrying forward, the scouts were quickly on the spot.
They found the reason why Peter had been forced to temporarily leave his charges while he went in search of help. The oldest child could not have been much more than five, the second three, and the youngest less than two.
Later on they learned that Peter had carried the little one pretty much all the way, but when the second child broke down and was unable to walk any further Peter just knew he had to do something different.
“It’s all right, little ones,” said Bud Morgan, with one of his reassuring smiles that made all youngsters like him. “We’ve come to take you to the house of your neighbor, Mrs. Heffner. She’ll keep you till daddy comes.”
“But Peter said we must stay here,” remarked the oldest child, a boy who looked as though later on in life he would be able to hoe his own row much better than, according to common talk, his father was doing.