erchief around his leg! He didn't look at us, and he
hadn't touched the first-aid stuff on the rock.

As we hiked on, I kept noticing that smell of smoke--a piny smoke; and
it did not come from the dug-out, surely. Now I remembered that I had
been smelling that piny smoke all day, and I laid it to the two
camp-fires, but I must have been mistaken. Or else there was another
fire, still--or I had the smell in my nose and couldn't get it out. When
you are in the habit of smelling for something, you keep thinking that
it is there, all the time. A Scout must watch his imagination, and not
be fooled by it.

We climbed the side of the gulch, through the trees; the Red Fox boys
carried their packs right along, without resting any more than I did.
They were toughened to the long trail. The sun began to be clouded and
hazy. When we halted halfway up, and looked back and down, at the
dug-out, the man had hobbled across from the dug-out and was leading
back his horse.

Just then Scout Ward spoke up. "It is smoke!" he exclaimed, puffing and
sniffing. "Boys, it's a forest fire somewhere."

So they had been smelling it, too.

I looked at the sun. The haze clouding it was the smoke!

"Climb on top, so we can see," I said; and away we went.

The timber was thick with spruces and pines. Up we went, among them, for
the top of the ridge. We came out into an open space; beyond, the ridge
fell away in a long slope of the timber, for the snowy range; and old
Pilot Peak was right before us, to the west. The sun was getting low,
and was veiled by smoke drifting across it. And on the right, distant a
couple of miles, up welled a great brownish-black mass from the fire
itself.

A forest fire, and a big one! The smell was very strong.

The Red Fox Scouts looked at me. "What ought we to do?" asked Scout Van
Sant. "Maybe you know more about these forest fires than we do."

Maybe I did. The Rockies are places for big forest fires, all right, and
I'd heard the Guards and Rangers talk, in our town. The timber was dry
as a bone, at this time of year. The smoke certainly was drifting our
way. And fire travels up-hill faster than it travels down-hill. So this
ridge, surrounded by the timber, was a bad spot to be caught in,
especially if that fire should split and come along both sides. No
timber ridge for us!

"Turn back and make for the creek; shall we?" proposed Scout Ward.

That didn't sound good to me, somehow. The creek was beginning to