While the others were indulging in this little exchange of sentiments, the scout master had advanced toward the tied bear holding out his hat water-pail. The animal eagerly thrust his snout into the cool liquid and seemed to be drinking after a fashion, which told that Hugh had been right when he said the beast must have been fastened here for some time.
“He wasn’t there when I came down from the top of the hill yesterday morning, I give you my word for that, Chief,” Arthur announced, as he stood ready to hand his hat of water over to the other, should the first supply prove insufficient to satisfy the poor beast. “You can see for yourself that it would be impossible for me to have passed on this trail and missed running across him.”
“But what d’ye reckon has become of his master, and how are we goin’ to get the dancing bear back to town, when he don’t know us? That’s what I’d like to know,” Billy demanded apprehensively, not as yet daring to come within five feet of the sleek monster.
“I’m bothered to know what it all means,” Hugh told them. “When he fastened the bear here, the man must have had some notion in his head but he’s been kept from coming back again.”
“Would he want to abandon the poor thing just because it wasn’t paying him to tote the bear along?” asked Arthur.
“I wouldn’t think that could be,” said Hugh. “As far as I know, these men who own trained bears always make a good deal of money and they spend mighty little. Besides, such an animal would be worth fifty or a hundred dollars for exhibition purposes, I’d think. No, there’s some other reason for it. I’ve got half a notion to try to find the man’s track leading away from here, and see which way he did go. What if he fell down some little precipice—there are such things around these hills—and broke his leg? Why, he might lie there and die for all anybody’d hear him call, up in this lonely region.”
Both of the other scouts were more or less worked up by what the patrol leader had just said. It was not very difficult for them to picture a variety of serious perils along the lines suggested by Hugh; they rather liked the idea of picking up the departing trail of the foreigner just to see if they would be equal to the task of discovering him, perhaps asleep, near by.
“But I don’t see how anybody could sleep through all that noise Billy here put up,” Arthur chose to remark, “when he came rushing down the hill with his hair standing on end, and his eyes looking as if they would drop out of his head.”
“Oh! hold on, there, go easy with a fellow, can’t you?” urged Billy reproachfully. “Of course I own up I was some scared, but it wasn’t as bad as all that, and you know it, Arthur. Guess anybody’d have had some shock to run across that thing all of a sudden and believe it to be a wild bear.”
“Why, before we’re done with it,” boasted Arthur, “you may see me riding on the old fellow’s broad back like as not. They’re really as tame and docile as kittens, I was told; that is, after they get to know you, and you’ve fed ’em a few times so they’ll look on you as a friend. There, he acts as though he’d had all the water he wanted, Hugh. Just throw out the rest, and I’ll put on my wet hat, which ought to feel nice and cool after all that soaking.”