“Yes?” laughed Mr. Wilde. “Well, I’m pretty good at eating myself, but there’s one thing I can’t swallow and that’s the stories I hear about scouts saving drowning people and finding kidnapped children and all that kind of stuff. You kids seem to have the newspapers hypnotized. I read about a kid that put out a forest fire and saved a lot of lives at the risk of his own life. How much do you suppose the scout people pay to get that kind of stuff into the papers?” “Oh, vast sums,” said Warde. Mr. Wilde contemplated the three of them where they sat crowded on the Pullman seat opposite him. There was great amusement twinkling in his eyes, but approval too. He did not take them too seriously as scouts, _real scouts_, but just the same he liked them immensely. “I bet you’ve been to the Yellowstone a lot of times,” said Ed Carlyle. “Oh, a few,” said Mr. Wilde. “I’ve been up in woods off the trails where little boys don’t go—without their nurse girls.” “I’ve heard there are bandits in the park,” said Westy. “Millions of them,” said Mr. Wilde. “But don’t be afraid, they don’t hang out at the hotels where you’ll be.” “Is it true there are train robbers out this way?” Westy asked. “Getting scared? Why, I thought boy scouts could handle train robbers.” “We can’t even handle you,” Warde said. CHAPTER II MR. WILDE HOLDS FORTH Indeed the three boys seemed on the point of giving Mr. Wilde up for a hopeless case. “Why? Do you want to go hunting train robbers?” the exasperating stranger asked. “Well,” said Westy, rather disgusted, “we wouldn’t be the first boy scouts to help the authorities. Some boy scouts in Philadelphia helped catch a highway robber.” This seemed greatly to amuse Mr. Wilde. He screwed his cigar over from one corner of his mouth to the other and looked at the boys good-naturedly, but seriously. “Well, I’ll tell you just how it is,” he said. “There are really two Yellowstone Parks. There’s the Yellowstone Park where you go, and there’s the Yellowstone Park where I go. There’s the tame Yellowstone Park and the wild Yellowstone Park.