"Ours is a losing game in earnest--all because we didn't look out and take proper precautions so that we might have some chance of returning by the way that we came," remarked the soloist with a grim laugh. "Now, we 'jolly well must look out!' as the song says. I'm going to climb the next tree that's good an' tall, and see whether I can discover any faraway smoke that would show us where a house might be,--or a gap in the woods,--or anything." "Good idea! I'll climb too," seconded Leon. "You choose one tree; I'll take another, and see what we can make out!" But they were toiling through a comparatively insignificant part of the fine woods now, where the foamy undergrowth billowed about their ears. Here the birch-trees, hickories, and maples, with an occasional pine and hemlock, only averaged from thirty-five to forty feet in stature. Not for another half-mile or so did Nixon sight a tall stately trunk towering above its forest brethren, its many-pointed leaves proclaiming it to be a fine red oak. "Whoo'! Whoo'! It's me for that oak-tree!" he cried. "I'll shin up that, right to the top and scour the horizon. 'Twill be easily climbed too!" "See that freak pine with the divided trunk a little farther on? I'm going to climb that," announced Leon Chase. "It's a fine tree, if it is a freak--like the Siamese Twins." In another minute with the agility of a cat he had climbed to the crotch of the freak tree where its twin trunks divided. "Look out! those lower branches are brown an' rotten, Starrie. I wouldn't trust to them if I were you!" shouted Colin, indicating the drooping pine-boughs about ten feet from the ground; he kicked a similar large drab branch, as he spoke, which had fallen and lay decaying at the foot of the freak tree. "Right you are! I won't." Leon was a wonderful climber; twining his arms and legs round one olive-green trunk of the divided pine he managed to reach the firm boughs above through whose needles the late afternoon breeze crooned a sonorous warning. The scout, meanwhile, had clambered like a squirrel nearly to the top of the splendid oak-tree. Presently the two boys upon the ground heard a shrill "Tewitt! Tewitt!" the signal-whistle of his peewit patrol, fully sixty feet above their heads, followed by Nixon's voice shouting: "Can't see smoke anywhere, fellows--or any sign of a real break in the woods. But there seems to be some sort of little clearing about two hundred yards from here, I should say!" He was carefully scanning the space over intervening tree-tops with his eye, knowing that if he could judge this distance in the woods with approximate accuracy it would count as a point in his favor toward realizing the height of his ambition and graduating into a first-class scout.