shoot at?"

"Rabbits."

He hadn't seen them before, but now he saw them on the ground. "Aw,
jiminy!" he exclaimed. "We've got something better than that, but we
can't make a fire and our matches are all wet and so are our blankets,
and we don't know what to do. There's another fellow with me. We're
lost."

He was a sight; wet and dirty and sweaty from running, and scared.

"What are you doing? Camping?" I asked.

He nodded. "We started for Duck Lake, with nothing but blankets and what
grub we could carry; but we got to chasing around and we missed the
trail and now we don't know where we are. Gee, but we're wet and cold.
Where's your camp?"

"Back on the ridge."

"Got a fire?"

"Uh huh," I nodded. "Sure."

"Come on," he said. "We'll go and get the other fellow and then we'll
camp near you so as to have some fire."

"All right," I said.

He led off, and I picked up the rabbits and followed. He kept hooting,
and the other boy answered, and we went down into the gulch where the
creek flowed. Now, that was the dickens of a place to camp! Anybody
ought to know better than to camp down at the bottom of a narrow gulch,
where it is damp and nasty and dark. They did it because it was beside
the water, and because there was some soft grass that they could lie on.
(Note 25.)

The other boy was about seventeen, and was huddled in a blanket, trying
to scratch a match and light wet paper. He wore a big Colt's
six-shooter on a cartridge belt about his waist.

"Come out, Bat," called the boy with me. "Here's a kid from another
camp, where they have fire and things."

Bat grunted, and they gathered their blankets and a frying-pan and other
stuff.

"Lookee! This beats rabbit," said the first boy (his name was Walt); and
he showed me what they had killed. It was four grouse!

Now, that was mean.

"It's against the law to kill grouse yet," I told him.

"Aw, what do we care?" he answered. "Nobody knows."

"It's only a week before the season opens, anyhow," spoke Bat. "We got
the old mother and all her chickens. If we hadn't, somebody would,
later."

Fellows like that are as bad as a forest fire. Just because of them,
laws are made, and they break them and the rest of us keep them.

We climbed out of the gulch, and I was so mad I let them carry their own
things. The woods were dusky, and I laid a straight course for camp. It
was easy to find, because I knew that I had hunted with my back to it,
in sound of the w