Another half hour pa.s.sed and once more the lad paused, this time with the realization strong upon him that he had lost his way.
Placing both hands to his mouth Tad uttered a long drawn "C-o-o-e-e-e!" He listened intently, then repeated the call.
The sound of his own voice almost frightened him.
"Oh, I"m lost!" he cried, now fully appreciating his position.
The panic of the lost seized him and Tad ran this way and that, plunging ahead for some distance, then swerving to the right or to the left in a desperate attempt to free himself from the endless thicket, bruising his body from contact with the trunks of the trees and cutting his hands as they struck the rocks violently when he fell.
"Tad Butler, you stop this!" he commanded sternly, bringing himself up sharply. "I didn"t think you were such a silly kid as to be afraid of the dark." But in his innermost heart the lad knew that it was not the shadows that had so upset him. It was the feeling of being lost in an unknown forest.
Instead of being in the foothills as he had supposed, he was penetrating the fastnesses of the Rosebud Mountains themselves.
"There is no use in my going on like this," he decided finally. "I"ll sit down and wait for daylight. That"s all I can do. I surely can find my way back to camp when the light comes again."
The next question was where should he go--where find a safe place to stay until morning. Tad remembered with a start that there were bears in the range. He knew this from his own recent experience. How many other savage beasts there might be in the woods he did not know. He had heard some one speak of mountain lions, and having seen these before, he fervently hoped he might not have another experience with them, unarmed as he was.
"If this gun only were loaded, I should feel better."
After searching around for some time, Tad found a ledge that seemed to rise to a considerable height. Up this he clambered. It would give him a good view in the morning anyway, besides protecting him from any prowling animals that might chance in that part of the forest.
Tad ensconced himself in a slight depression, and with a flat rock for a resting place, leaned back determined to make the best of his position.
A gentle breeze now stirred the foliage above his head and all about him until the sound became a restless murmur, as if Nature were holding council over the lad"s predicament.
The lost boy did not so interpret the sounds, however. He made a more practical application of them.
"It"s going to rain," he decided wisely, casting a glance above him at the sky, which was becoming rapidly overcast. "And I haven"t any umbrella," he added, grinning at his own feeble joke. "Well, I"ve been wet before. I cannot well be any more so than I was last night. I"ll bet the rainwater will be warmer than the waters in the East Fork. If it isn"t I"ll surely freeze to death."
Fortunately he had worn his coat when he left the camp, else he would now have suffered from the cold. As it was, he shivered, but more from nervousness than from the chill night air.
"Yoh--hum, but I"m sleepy," he murmured drowsily. A moment more and his head had drooped to one side and Tad Butler was sleeping as soundly as if tucked away between his own blankets back in his tent in the foothills.
CHAPTER VII
ALMOST BETRAYED BY A SNEEZE
Tad awakened with a start.
His first impression was that he smelled smoke, and for the moment he believed himself back in camp. A movement convinced him of his error. A jagged point of rock had cut into his flesh while he slept. He almost cried out with the pain of it, and as he moved a little to shift his body from it, the wound hurt worse than ever.
The lad was still surrounded by an impenetrable darkness. It all came back to him--but standing out stronger than all the rest was the fact that he was lost.
"Wonder how long I"ve slept," he muttered. "Seems as if I had been here a year. Lucky I awoke or I"d been stuck fast on that rock, for good and all. Whew! B-r-r-r! I think it"s going to snow. Thought it was going to rain just before I went to sleep. Wonder if they have snow up here in the summer time. Have almost everything else,"
continued the lad, muttering to himself, half under his breath.
Slowly rising he shook himself vigorously and rubbed his palms together to get his circulation stirred up.
"h.e.l.lo, what"s that? I remember now, I smelled smoke or thought I did."
Tad sniffed the chill air suspiciously.
"It is smoke," he decided. "Maybe I"ve set the woods on fire with my matches. Guess I"ll climb down and investigate."
He started to move down the side of the ledge when it occurred to him that perhaps it would be better to investigate from where he was; he did not know what danger he might be running into if he were to climb down without first having made sure that it was perfectly safe to do so. Just what he might meet with he did not know. But he felt an uneasy sense of impending danger.
"Often feel that way when I first wake up, especially if I"ve been eating pie the night before," he confided to himself, in order to urge his courage back to life.
Bending forward he peered from side to side, but was unable to find a single trace of light, anywhere about him. If it were a fire it must be some distance away, he concluded.
"If it were some distance away, I wouldn"t smell it. The wind has died down. No, the fire that smoke comes from is right near by me,"
he whispered.
The sense of human habitation near him caused his pulses to beat more rapidly. The question that remained for him to decide, was who was it that had started the fire?
Tad Butler determined to find out if possible, and at once.
He crept cautiously to the right, feeling his way along the ledge, not being sure how near he was to the edge. He found it more suddenly than he had expected, and narrowly missed falling over head first.
"Whew! That was a close call," he muttered. "I must be more careful."
There was no sign of either smoke or fire below him, as he observed after getting his balance again. He drew back cautiously and worked his way to the side that he had been facing, yet with no better result than before.
There yet remained two sides to be investigated--the one he had climbed up and the other that lay to the left of him. Tad chose the latter as the most likely to give him the information he sought. However, he found that the edge lay some distance away. The table of rock was much wider than he had imagined, when he first ascended to it.
The way was rough. Once the lad"s foot slipped into a crevice. In seeking to withdraw it he gave the ankle a wrench that caused him to settle down on the rocks with a half moan of pain. His shoe had become wedged in between the rocks so that he had difficulty in withdrawing it at all, and the injured ankle gave him a great deal of pain as he struggled to release himself.
"Guess I"ll have to take off my shoe. Hope I haven"t sprained my ankle. I"ll be in a fine mess if I have," he grumbled.
The ankle gave him considerable trouble; but he rubbed it all of ten minutes, and he found that he could endure his shoe again. He was full of curiosity as well as anxiety to learn the cause of the smoke, which, by this time, seemed to be coming his way in greater volume.
After having relaced the shoe and leggin, Tad started on again, this time on all fours, not trusting himself to try to walk, feeling his way ahead of him with his hands, which he considered the safer way to do.
"There"s somebody down there," he whispered, after a long interval of slow creeping over the rocks. "I wonder who it is? Perhaps they are looking for me. I"ll give them a surprise if they are."
The surprise, however, was to be Tad"s.
At last he reached the edge of the little b.u.t.te. Slowly stretching his neck and lying flat on his stomach, he peered over.
A cloud of black smoke rolled up into his face, causing the lad to withdraw hastily.
"Aka-c-h-e-w," sneezed Tad, burying his face in his hands.
"Whew, what a smudge! I"ll bet they heard that sneeze."