“That’s the way it treats me always,” affirmed Lub, looking inexpressibly relieved at hearing the dictum pronounced that meant another night with his little blanket-mate; “I never wanted a thing real bad, and kept being put off and put off but that it got to be what my mother would call an absorbing passion with me.”
“Yes, just like the baby in the bath leaning over and trying to reach a cake of well known soap, you’d ‘never be happy till you got it,’ eh, Lub?” jeered X-Ray.
“It’s contradiction that makes men great,” said Lub, ponderously. “Difficulties bring out all there is in a fellow, and Phil will tell you so too. The life that flows on calmly never amounts to much. That’s what makes these mountaineers such a hardy lot; they have to fight for everything they get, while the people on the fertile plains make an easy living.”
“Gee! listen to the philosopher talk, will you?” said Ethan, pretending to be much surprised, when in truth he knew very well that once in so often Lub was apt to drop into this moralizing mood, and air some pretty bright views, for the benefit of his comrades in arms.
“No trouble now telling where that other camp is,” X-Ray informed them. “All you have to do is to take a glance over that way, and you’ll see a thick black smoke rising up.”
“If we’d had any idea there’d be trouble lying in wait for us around here,” ventured Ethan, “we might have kept them guessing where we had our camp. It would be easy to pick out good dry wood, of which there is plenty lying around, and using only that kind. It gives out so little smoke they never would have noticed; whereas the half-green stuff tells anybody with half an eye where the fire is.”
“What you say about the wood and the smoke is all very true, Ethan,” remarked Phil; “but all the same I doubt whether it would have prevented their finding our location, once Mr. James Bodman started to make things interesting by offering a bonus to his guides to smell us out. They’d have heard us chopping, it might be, for in these still woods sounds carry a long ways when the air is just right.”
“Yes, I guess that’s so,” X-Ray admitted, “because several times I’ve been positive I heard the sound of a faraway ax at work; and I noticed that the wind was coming from that quarter too.”
“To-night we keep watch as we planned, eh, Phil?” Ethan asked.
“We’d be wise to do it just as long as we expect to hang out around this section, and that crowd is over there,” he was informed.