Perhaps it was because these three good scouts were after all just boys that they began to be conscious of certain real or imagined perils in their big adventure. They talked over among themselves what they were likely to be expected to do and they began to be a little concerned about the secrecy which characterized the expedition. Westy had talked of doing something big, of being a scout in the large and adventurous sense. And he had felt quite ashamed of scouting as he knew it, when he allowed himself to view it through the sophisticated gaze of Mr. Wilde. He began to wonder now whether all his big talk, or rather the expression of his big hopes, was not going to plunge him and his companions into perils which he had not anticipated. Poor Westy, he was not afraid; he was only young and unseasoned. Mr. Wilde, on the other hand, was thoroughly seasoned—oh, very. So thoroughly seasoned that he did not take these youngsters into his confidence. And thereby ensued something very like tragedy. The trail up the mountain was through such a wilderness as the boys had never seen before. It was late in the evening when they came out into the open and beheld a panorama far below them and reaching eastward as far as the eye could see. Mountains, mountains, mountains, rolling one upon another in stately and magnificent profusion. So they might have been for thousands, millions, of years without so much as one contaminating sign of man and all his claptrap works.
How small, how insignificant, would even a city seem in that endless region of rock and hill. The vast scene was gray in the twilight, for even the sun was sinking to rest in the more hospitable direction whence they had come. They were facing the sunless chill of a Rocky Mountain evening, looking eastward toward the only compass point that was open to their view. They were almost at the edge of a mighty precipice, a stupendous gallery of nature. It was as if a mountain had been rent asunder and half of it taken away to afford a dizzy view of the amphitheater below.
As the party paused to make their camp within the shelter of the forest a few hundred feet from the brow of the precipice, Mr. Wilde, his unlighted cigar tilted like a flag-pole out of his mouth sauntered over toward the edge with Billy, the camera man, with the practical manner of a man who might intend to buy real estate in that forsaken region or who was picking out a suitable spot for a tennis court. The boys, useful at last, and competent in their task, began pitching their tent and making ready their little camp. They saw Mr. Wilde and the camera man approach a little clump of something dark within a very few feet of the precipice. It was bare and bleak out there, without background or vegetation, and the two khaki-clad figures seemed bereft of their individuality; they were just two dark objects examining another object on the naked, cheerless rock. High in the air above a black speck moved through the dusk and disappeared among the distant mountains.
“I don’t see how they can get a picture of a thing like that,” sai............