On one of the seats lay a duffel bag containing the few camping utensils which they had brought against the unlikely prospect of a night’s bivouac in the open. Westy was glad that they had not exposed these up-to-date devices to their acquaintance in the next car. He might have commented flippantly on the collapsible or the folding frying pan. In a previous encounter with that Philistine of the smoking car he had inquired about the meaning of Westy’s treasured pathfinder’s badge, and had said that when he was a boy he had often played hares and hounds and hide-and-seek. “Come on out in back,” said Warde. They staggered on through the train holding the backs of seats to steady their progress. All the passengers seemed weary, the cars littered and hot and stuffy. Discarded newspapers and magazines lay on the seats and floor. The passengers sprawled lazily in postures far from elegant. Only the train seemed wide-awake and bent upon some definite purpose. It roared and rattled and whistled and now and again a faint answering whistle was heard from the distant mountains as if the ghost of some locomotive long dead were concealed there. In one of the cars a litter of sticky bits of tissue paper filled the aisle in company of an empty box which had contained somebody or other’s fresh lemon-drops. Westy was not the scout to pass by such a litter, he had cleared up the luncheon rubbish after too many motoring parties for that. But he did not stoop to this worthy task of the scout now. He was not in the mood to be a menial, a housemaid scout; not with the exploits of Shining Sun so fresh in his mind. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with himself and he passed the litter by in proud disdain of it. “Don’t you be a lemon-drop scout,” he said sneeringly to Warde, who was just behind him. “How did you know I was going to stoop?” Warde asked. Ah, that was the question. It was because Westy Martin was a better scout than he knew and like the true woodsman had eyes in the back of his head. “I’m kind of sorry we didn’t ask him if he’d let us go up in the forest with him,” Warde said. “A tall chance,” said Westy disconsolately. CHAPTER XXXVIII SOMETHING “REAL” And so these three parlor scouts, winners of the Rotary Club award, reached the rear platform of the last car and gazed upon the landscape as it receded before their eyes. The whimsical Mr. Wilde had put them in bad sorts and the great, vast, stupendous west seemed to confirm all that their chance acquaintance had said. How hopeless the lot of the lost wanderer here, how useless the good scout handbook, how futile all the pleasantly primitive devices to find one’s way home—when home is just around the corner. They were just boys playing at scouting, nice boys, boy scouts. Well, at all events, it had won them this trip to the Yellowstone where there would be much to see....