44.) But the other smoke
didn't answer.

Then I thought of making the signal meaning "I am lost. Help"; but I
said to myself: "No, you don't. You're not calling for help, yet. You'd
be a weak kind of a Scout, to sit down and call for help. There's a sign
for you. Maybe that smoke is the beaver man. Sic him." And trampling out
my own fire, and stuffing the flags into my shirt and tying my jacket
around me, lining that other fire by a dead pine at the foot of the
hill, away I went.

When I got to the dead pine I drew another bee-line ahead as far as I
could see, with a stump as the end, and followed that. But this was an
awful rough, thick country. First I got into a mess of fallen timber,
where the dead trunks were criss-crossed like jackstraws; and they were
smooth and hard and slippery, and I had to climb over and crawl under
and straddle and slide, and turn back several times, and I lost my
bee-line. But I set my direction again by the sun on my face. Next I ran
into a stretch of those small black-jacks, so thick I could scarcely
squeeze between. And when I came out I was hot and tired, I tell you!

Now I was hungry, too, and thirsty; and I found that fire meant a whole
lot to me. If it didn't mean the man with the message, it meant food and
somebody to talk to, perhaps. The fallen timber and the black-jack
thicket had interfered with me so that I wasn't sure, any more, that I
was heading straight for the fire. Down into a deep gulch I must plunge,
and up I toiled, on the other side. It was about time that I climbed a
tree, or did something else, to locate that fire. When next I reached a
ridgy spot I chose a good pine and shinned it. From the top nothing was
visible except the same old sea of timber with island rocks spotting it
here and there, and with Pilot Peak and the snowy range in the wrong
quarter again.

Of course, by this time the breakfast smoke would have quit. That made
me desperate. I shinned down so fast that a branch broke and I partly
fell the rest of the way along the trunk, and tore my shirt and scraped
a big patch of skin from my chest. This hurt. When I landed in a heap I
wanted to bawl. But instead, I struck off along the ridge, keeping high
so that if there was smoke I would see it, yet.

The ridge ended in another gulch. I had begun to hate gulches. A
fellow's legs grow numb when he hasn't had much to eat. But into the
gulch I must go, and so down I plunged again. And when almost at the
b