“You kids are just going to see the park and you’ll have your hands full, too. You’ll sit in a nice comfortable automobile and the man will tell you what to look at and you’ll see geysers and things and canyons and a lot of odds and ends and you’ll have the time of your lives. There’s a picture shop between Norris and the Canyon; you drop in there and see if you can get a post card showing Pelican Cone. That’ll give you an idea of where _I’ll_ be. You can think of me up in the wilderness while you’re listening to the concert in the Old Faithful Inn. That’s where they have the big geyser in the back yard—spurts once an hour, Johnny on the spot. I suppose,” added the stranger with that shrewd, skeptical look which was beginning to tell on the boys, “that if you kids really saw a grizzly you wouldn’t stop running till you hit New York. I think you said scouts know how to run.” “We wouldn’t stop there,” said the Carlisle boy; “we’d be so scared that we’d just take a running jump across the Atlantic Ocean and land in Europe.” “What would you really do now if you met a bandit?” the stranger asked. “_Shoot him dead_ I suppose, like Deadwood Dick in the dime novels.” “We don’t read dime novels,” said Westy. “But just the same,” said Warde, “it might be the worse for that bandit. Didn’t you read——” The traveling man laughed outright. “All right, you can laugh,” said Westy, a trifle annoyed. The stranger stuck his feet up between Warde and Westy, who sat in the seat facing and put his arm on the farther shoulder of Eddie Carlisle who sat beside him. Then he worked his unlighted cigar across his mouth and tilted it at an angle which somehow seemed to bespeak a good-natured contempt of the boy scouts. “Just between ourselves,” said he, “who takes care of the publicity stuff for the boy scouts anyway? Who puts all this stuff in the newspapers about boy scouts finding lost people and saving lives and putting out forest fires and plugging up holes in dams and saving towns from floods and all that sort of thing? I read about one kid who found a German wireless station during the war——” “That was true,” snapped Warde, stung into some show of real anger by this flippant slander. “I suppose you don’t know that a scout out west in Illinois——” “You mean out _east_ in Illinois,” laughed the stranger. “You’re in the wild and woolly west and you don’t even know it. I suppose if you were dropped from the train right now you’d start west for Chicago.” The three boys laughed for it did seem funny to think of Illinois being far east of them. They felt a bit chagrined too at the realization that, after all, their view of the rugged wonders they were approaching was to be enjoyed from the rather prosaic vantage point of a sightseeing auto. What would Buffalo Bill or Kit Carson have said to that?