CHAPTER XVII.

MORE TROUBLE AHEAD.

"What have you?" asked Step Hen, who, strange to say, in spite of his lame leg, arrived just a little in advance of the other two.

Giraffe was standing there, twisting that long neck of his this way and that. He declined to say anything until Thad had arrived on the scene. Then, with an expressive pose, he pointed to the ground near his feet.

"What d'ye call that, eh? Tell me I ain't got the eye of an eagle? Somebody else might have gone stumping along, and never seen it. But you can ketch a weasel asleep as easy as you can fool me."

"It's a trail, all right," said Thad.

"Say _his_ trail," persisted Giraffe.

"Bumpus did make it, that's certain," Allan broke in with.

"And _after_ the storm, too?"

"No question about that, because the rain hasn't washed the marks at all," was the joyous declaration of Allan.

"See?" cried Giraffe.

If he had been wearing a vest. Step Hen really believed the proud lengthy scout would have thrust his thumbs into the arm holes and assumed a pose, as though about to have his picture taken as a serious rival to Cooper's "Leatherstocking," the greatest of trail finders.

"What luck!" Step Hen broke out with.

"Luck nothing," flashed back Giraffe, refusing to be cheated out of any of his honors. "It's the reward of patient, plodding work, and using eyes and brain right along. Now, if I'd been satisfied to limp along, looking up at the sky, and all around, but never once on the ground, like some people I know do, d'ye suppose I'd ever run across this trail? Not much. Give Old Eagle Eye his due, Step Hen."

"Yes, he deserves it," said Thad, "because this is a most important find. It places us on top once more."

"Because now we've got something to work on," added Allan.

"Was this track made this morning?" asked Step Hen.

Allan shook his head.

"No," he replied, "I don't think so."

"But why shouldn't it be?" continued the other scout, bound to know.

"Why, you can see that the ground was still quite wet when he passed along here. That wouldn't have been the case this morning, for in twelve hours or more it must have dried out pretty well," Allan explained.

"That's so; I never thought of such an easy explanation," Step Hen admitted.

"Oh! there's a heap of things about this business we don't know," said Giraffe; "but it all sounds so mighty interesting I'm bound to learn right along."

They were following the new trail while exchanging remarks along this line.

"One good thing about it," Thad went on to say, "we now know Bumpus must have come through the storm all right."

"However did he do it?" murmured Giraffe, perplexed because the tenderfoot was proving such a wonder.

"Three to one he found a hollow tree and crawled in," grumbled Step Hen. "With the luck he's got, why of course lightning never struck there; while with me it was just sure to."

"Well," remarked Thad, "between you and me I don't believe Bumpus would do that, because we were talking of lightning only the other day. He had an uncle who was killed that way when a tree was struck; and Bumpus said nobody would ever get him to take such chances. I remember his asking me if it would be all right to crawl in a hollow log that lay flat on the ground, and I told him yes. So if he was able to find a log big enough to hold him, I guess that's what he did."

Giraffe gave a whistle. There was a little trace of envy in his manner, for Giraffe was a boy, and it did seem to him Bumpus was developing along the lines of a scout altogether too fast.

"I see your finish as patrol leader, Thad," he remarked. "That Bumpus has just waked up, and there's no telling what he'll do. I expect we'll all be kowtowing to him yet, like he was a real Chinese mandarin."

"Glad of it," laughed Thad. "And it would tickle me a lot, I tell you, if a few more scouts would take a notion to wake up."

"Well," returned Giraffe, "they may, yet. I know two that are digging knuckles into their eyes right at this minute, and stretchin' and yawnin' like they just meant to stir out of their dope sleep; eh, Step Hen?"

"That's so, Giraffe! Bumpus has set us the pace, I tell you," came the reply.

"What do you make of the trail, Allan?" the scoutmaster asked.

"About this," replied the tracker. "Bumpus was leg-weary about this time. Plenty to show it. And I wouldn't be surprised if we came on his camp before long. I've seen where he stepped out of his way, looking for dry wood, and then went on again, as if not satisfied."

"Hurrah for Bumpus! He's our pard;" exclaimed Step Hen, glad to even bask in the reflected light of so much glory.

"I wonder, now," Giraffe remarked, his thoughts naturally turning in the one direction, "was he able to make a fire? Lots of fellers that like to call themselves scouts wouldn't know how, when every stick of wood was soaking wet after such a rain."

"Oh! they ain't all such fire cranks as you've always been, Giraffe," ventured Step Hen. "And I say it's good for the country they ain't. I reckon the whole wood supply of the United States would have been used up by now if the rest of the scouts had their minds set like you."

"But wait and see," said Thad. "I've got a notion that Bumpus is going to surprise some of us a lot more. Fact is, I believe he's just had his mind set on a hike like this for some time, because he's been asking dozens of questions of me, and setting the answers down in that little note-book of his, till he half filled it."

"Was one of them about makin' 'a fire after a rain?'" demanded Giraffe.

"Just that," replied Thad.

"You told him how to dig out the dry heart from a stump or a log, to start his fire with, didn't you, Thad?"

"Explained it all fully," answered the patrol leader.

"Oh! if that's the case I just guess he will have made a fire. It's easy, once you've been shown how," grumbled Giraffe.

"But you had to be told how, once, don't forget, Giraffe," Thad went on to say. "Be generous now, and remember that Bumpus has had his outdoor education sadly neglected. I'm glad he's showing new life, and I hope it will keep right along. I believe it will. That's the beauty of this scout business--once a boy gets a taste of these many things that call for self-reliance and thought, he keeps on wanting to know more. His appetite becomes enormous; but the food supply in the shape of information really has no limit, you understand."

"I'm going in for it with all my heart and soul, Thad," asserted Giraffe, more seriously than the patrol leader had known him to be for a long time.

"Me too," echoed Step Hen. "It's a good thing to know how to save a feller's life if he gets near drowned, cuts his foot with an axe, gets shot by accident, or else has the hard luck to run up against a mean rattler."

"And you can count on me to help you all I'm able to," said Thad. "There are a lot of things I don't know, myself. Allan, here, is teaching me a heap about following a trail, and I'm enjoying it more than I can explain. Nothing like the practical experience, after all. The book-taught scout is all very well, but he has to change a lot of his ideas when he comes to see the same things really and truly done. And some of them are so different from his notion that he can hardly recognize 'em. What is it, Allan?"

This last was directed toward the tracker, who had suddenly shown evidences of excitement. They saw him bend down and more closely examine the ground in front.

Then he whistled, and turned a face toward his chums on which they could plainly read new anxiety.

"It beats anything how they could have just happened to cross the trail of Bumpus," he observed.

Thad instantly jumped at conclusions.

"Meaning our old acquaintances. Hank Dodge and Pierre Laporte?" he said.

"Here are their footprints as plain as anything," continued Allan. "Look for yourselves, because all of you know what they were like. Here's where Hank rested the butt of his gun on the ground, while he talked it over with Pierre; and yes, he even emptied his pipe right at this place, knocking it on his shoe, because you can see some half-burned tobacco in this footprint."

"Do you think they knew who Bumpus was?" asked Thad.

"They could guess, easy enough, after remembering what we said about our having a tenderfoot chum wandering around here by himself," was the prompt reply of the trail finder.

"But then, it wasn't any of their business," Giraffe went on to say. "They might have had curiosity enough to figure out who Bumpus was; but they'd never seen him, and so of course he hadn't done anything to injure them."

He looked troubled, though, even while thus trying to assure himself that Bumpus could not be in any peril because of these two ugly timber cruisers.

"But his chums had riled them up considerably," Allan went on, "and perhaps they were mean enough to think they could hit us, through Bumpus."

Step Hen ground his teeth in anger, while his eyes flashed ominously.

"Did they change their course right here, Allan?" he asked.

"Just what they did," was the reply.

"And followed after our chum?" Step Hen went on.

"You can see for yourself that their prints blot his out in places," the other replied.

"Come on!" said Step Hen, shaking his gun furiously.