And so these three parlor scouts, winners of the Rotary Club award, reached the rear platform of the last car and gazed upon the landscape as it receded before their eyes. The whimsical Mr. Wilde had put them in bad sorts and the great, vast, stupendous west seemed to confirm all that their chance acquaintance had said. How hopeless the lot of the lost wanderer here, how useless the good scout handbook, how futile all the pleasantly primitive devices to find one’s way home—when home is just around the corner. They were just boys playing at scouting, nice boys, boy scouts. Well, at all events, it had won them this trip to the Yellowstone where there would be much to see....
There was certainly not much to see at Emigrant. If there had ever been an Emigrant there it must have emigrated away, or been blown away as Mr. Wilde had said of other western stopping places.
Certainly there was no sign of life there. Yet evidently the place was useful to the railroad for the train stopped there, a visitation of life and energy in a scene of desolation.
Not a living soul was there to welcome them. Even the companionable noise of the train had ceased or died down to a slow pulsating sound of the locomotive. It seemed an impatient sound as if the steel brute were anxious to be on its way again. How lonesome, even forbidding the landscape looked from the cozy, little refuge where they viewed it. Only this little platform between them and the vast unknown.
Westy was a sensible, thoughtful boy and the bigness of the country impressed him. It affected his mood. What Mr. Wilde had said would probably not have been taken too seriously if Westy had been in the east. It was not Mr. Wilde alone, but the whole environment as well, which made all that Westy was and had accomplished paltry by comparison. It all seemed to belittle his scouting and make it infantile and ridiculous. Everything seemed to impart piquancy to Mr. Wilde’s home truths. Here indeed was the land where men had fought with untamed Nature and won out.
It seemed to Westy that he had been swimming with a life preserver. He sat down on the car platform and rested his chin on his hands and gazed about. It was not a propitious mood for a boy to be in who was about to be shown the wonders of the Yellowstone National Park. He almost wished that he had not met that disturbing person, Mr. Wilde. He could not get Shining Sun out of his mind. To do anything on a little scale seemed contemptible to Westy. Was scouting after all a toy?
His two companions caught his mood though they were not as impressionable as he. They sat down on the platform beside him and the three made a rather disconsolate trio, considering that they............