“You, Martin, go as the Rotary Club’s winning candidate. Carlisle and Hollister go with you as the two winners of special mention for their exploits and are sent by Mr. Temple. I have suggested to him that you be called the Temple Trio, but he insists that the name of the Rotary Club shall be used. Your friend Mr. Hasbrook suggests that since probably none of you know how to shoot, you be called the Bungling Bunch.” (Great laughter suddenly increased to uproar by the thunderous voice of Scout Harris.) “It’s just like I said it would be, only more so!” he shouted. “It’s—it’s—it’s—it’s like two helpings of dessert! We’re going to have two of them in our troop! That shows even when I’m mistaken I’m right!” And amid the tumult of cheers and laughter, Edwin Carlisle, scout of Westboro, stood smiling, silent, obedient, till Mr. Atwater called to him that he might sit down. So it happened that Westy Martin not only went to the Yellowstone, but went in company of two companions the following summer. It was natural that in the long interval of waiting these three scouts should strike up a sort of special comradeship, and by spring they were inseparable. At last the big day came, and they were speeding westward in a comfortable Pullman car, beguiling the tedious hours of travel by matching their wits against a rather amusing stranger, a traveling man, whose acquaintance they had made on the train. CHAPTER XXXIV WESTWARD HO “Grizzlies? Oh, hundreds of them! But they’re away back up in the mountains; you won’t see them.” “They’re about the fiercest animals there, aren’t they?” one of the boys asked. “Well,” drawled the traveling man, working his cigar over to the corner of his mouth and contemplating the boys in the shrewd way he had. “I don’t know about that. The wallerpagoes are pretty ructious. But they don’t bother you unless you bother them. Now you take a skehinkum, one of the big kind——” “You mean the kind with the whitish black fur?” Warde Hollister laughed. The traveling man worked his cigar over to the opposite corner of his mouth and looked at Warde with an expression of humorous skepticism. “Don’t you learn about them in the boy scouts?” he asked. “Oh, positively,” said Warde. “They’re all right is long as you don’t feed them on gum-drops.” The traveling man was having the time of his life with the three boys. They called him the traveling man because they thought he looked and talked like one. They had ventured to ask him his business and he had told them that it was starting revolutions in South America. He had even hinted that he was in a plot to blow up the Panama Canal, and had asked them not to mention this to their parents. He had said that if they kept his secret he might later let them in on a scheme to restore North America to its rightful owners, the Indians. “Wrap it up and we’ll take it and deliver it to them,” Warde Hollister had said.