“I say let’s follow the road,” said Westy. “We’re pretty sure to come to some kind of a settlement that way. If we follow the tracks we might come to a place where we couldn’t go any farther, like a high trestle or something like that. I wish we had a map. The road goes south for quite a distance, you can see that. What do you say?” “Just whatever you say, Westy,” said Ed.
“Same here,” said Warde.
“Only I don’t want to be blamed afterward,” said Westy, looking about him rather puzzled and doubtful.
When he thought of Shining Sun, thirty miles seemed nothing. But when he gazed about at the surrounding mountains, the distance between them and the Park seemed great and filled with difficulties. He was already wishing for things the very existence of which was doubtless unknown to the Indian boy who had become his inspiration.
“Anyway,” said Westy, “let’s make a resolution. You fellows say you made one and left me out of it. Now let’s make another one, all three of us. Let’s decide that we’ll hike from here to the Gardiner entrance without asking any help of any one. We’ll do it just as if we didn’t have anything with us at all.”
“We haven’t,” said Warde.
“I mean even our watches and matches and things like that,” said Westy. “Just as if we didn’t even have any clothes; you know, kind of primitive.”
“Don’t you think I’d better hang onto my safety-pin?” Ed asked. “Safety first. An Indian might—you know even an Indian might happen to have a safety-pin about him.”
Westy could not repress a smile, but for answer he pulled his store of matches out of his pocket and scattered them by the wayside. Warde, with a funny look of dutiful compliance, did the same. Ed, with a fine show of abandon and contempt for civilization, pulled his store of matches out of one pocket and put them in another. “May I keep my watch?” he asked. “It was given to me by my father when I became a back-yard scout.”
“Back-yard scout is good,” said Westy.
“Thank you muchly,” said Ed.
“I mean all of us,” Westy hastened to add.
It was funny how poor Westy was continually vacillating between these two good scouts who were with him and that unknown hero whose prowess had been detailed by the engaging Mr. Wilde. He was ever and again being freshly captivated by Ed’s sense of humor and whimsical banter and impressed by Warde’s quiet if amused compliance with this new order of things by which it seemed that the primitive was to be restored in all its romantic glory.
It never occurred to Westy to wonder what kind of a friend and companion his unknown hero, Shining Sun, would really be. What he was particularly anxious to do, now that the chance had come, was to show that cigar-smoking Philistine, Mr. Wilde, that boy scouts were really good for something when thrown on their own resources.
Pretty soon the first simple test of their scouting lore was made when they took their bearing by that vast, luminous compass, the sun. It worked its way through the dull, threatening sky bathing the forbidding heights in gold and contributing its good companionship to the trio of pilgrims. It seemed to say, “Come on, I’ll help you; it’s going to be nice weather in the Yellowstone.”
“That’s east,” said Westy. “We’re all right, the road goes south and if it stops going south, we’ll know it.”
“If it’s the kind of a road that does one thing one day and another thing the next day I have no use for it anyway,” said Warde.
“When it’s twelve o’clock I know a way to tell what time it is,” said Ed. “Remind me when it’s twelve o’clock and I’ll show you.”
The sun, which had not shown its face during the whole of the previous day, brightened the journey and raised the hopes of the travelers. To Westy, now that they were started along the road and everything seemed bright, their little enterprise seemed all too easy. He was even afraid that the road went straight to the Gardiner entrance of the park. He wanted to encounter some obstacles. He wanted this thing to have something of the character of an exploit.
Poor Westy, thirty miles over a wild country seemed not very much to him. It would be just about a two-days’ hike. But he cherished a little picture in his mind. He hoped that Mr. Madison C. Wilde would be still at the Mammoth Hotel when he and his companions reached there, having traversed—having traversed—thirty miles of—having forced Nature to yield up——
“We can catch some trout and eat them, all right,” he said aloud.
“Oh, we can eat them, all right,” said Ed. “When it comes to eating trout, I’ll take a handicap with any Indian youth and beat him to it.”
“It’s going to be pleasant to-night,” said Westy. “We can just sleep under a tree.”
“I hope it won’t be too pleasant,” said Ed.
“You make me tired,” laughed Westy.