As soon as I told Westy about it, he said he’d go into Haverstraw so as to save time, while I went back to camp and got the rest of the fellows. Oh boy, didn’t I hustle. I went running into camp shouting that there were two fellows and two girls on the top of Eagle’s Nest, and that we had to go and rescue them.

“Are they human?” Harry asked in that funny way he had.

“Yes, they’re human,” I said.

“Five toes on their front feet and four on their hind feet?” he asked me. “Had we better take some flypaper?”

“All right, you can laugh,” I said.

He said, “I’ve followed you through many wild adventures, but I never accompanied you in rescuing a maiden in distress.”

“Two maidens,” I said.

“All right,” he laughed; “the more the merrier.”

“And one of those fellows said I was a kid,” I told him. “Anyway, if I took a girl out, I’d know how to bring her back, that’s one thing. Wait till I see that fellow.”

Harry just laughed and said he wouldn’t miss it for anything. So we took two lanterns and started off along the road that ran north, and pretty soon we hit into the main road out of Haverstraw and came to the big white house with the windmill. Pretty soon we hit into the cow path that led up through the woods. It wasn’t just like the fellow said, because it fizzled out in a pasture. Anyway, across the pasture were thicker woods and we picked up the mountain trail there. If he had told us that it started right near a big stone, it would have saved us a lot of hunting around with our lanterns. That’s just the way it is with big fellows; they think they’re so smart that they don’t know anything. Gee whiz, you didn’t need a microscope to see that rock, but he never even mentioned it over the ’phone.

One thing, who ever named that mountain Eagle’s Nest ought to apologize to the first eagle he meets. It would have been a crazy eagle that would build a nest like that. As nearly as I could make out it was a lot of mountains all jumbled into one. Harry said it was a kind of a bouquet of mountains.

The trail led up through a pine forest and first it was easy following it. Then it went down into a hollow and got mixed up with a lot of rocks. I guess that must have been one of the rooms of the eagle’s nest. Anyway, we couldn’t follow it through there so we took a chance and picked it up on the other side.

That’s where the climbing began. Oh boy, that was some tangle—all underbrush and scrub oak. Good night, I don’t know how those girls ever got through there. Pretty soon I stopped and began sniffing.

“Do you know what it reminds me of?” I said. “It reminds me of raking up the leaves at home.”

“It smells like a rake,” Hunt Manners said, just joking.

“No, but I mean burning autumn leaves,” I said; “you know how it smells in Bridgeboro in the autumn. Then you know it’s getting cold and Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming. Anyway, you can laugh, but that smell always reminds me of Thanksgiving.”

Harry just sniffed, but didn’t say anything, and we started up again. There were lots of big hubbles, kind of valleys in the mountain, and most of them were rocky. I guess in the daytime it would be easy enough to keep the trail in those places, but at night, we had some job.

In one of those places we heard a sound as if some one was moving and we all stopped short and looked around. Pretty soon Dorry whispered for me to look, and he pointed to a dark thing kind of sneaking away.

Harry called, “Who’s there?”

There wasn’t any answer and the man, or whatever it was, was gone. It was so dark we couldn’t see which way he had gone.

Harry said, “That’s funny; this is a queer place to meet anybody.”

Will Dawson said, “I guess it was just a tramp.”

“Or a leopard,” Tom Warner said.

“Or maybe a what-is-it,” Charlie Seabury chimed in.

Anyway, we didn’t want to run any risk of losing the trail, so we didn’t bother about him, but kept on up the mountain.

The higher we got, the worse it was. There was what we call mongrel forest, tall trees and thick brush underneath. But it was straight going now, without any up and down places. The trail was easy to follow, only we had to go in single file, the first fellow (that was Harry) keeping it by holding a lantern low.

Pretty soon he stopped and said, “There’s brush burning somewhere around here; I can smell it.”

Ralph Warner said, “Listen.”

We all stood stark still and just as plain as could be, I could hear a crackling sound quite a way off.

“I don’t smell it now,” I said; “I did a little while ago.”

“Wait till the breeze is this way,” Harry said.

And then, in just a minute we got a good whiff of it—strong, just like when I burned the leaves on our lawn at home. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t smell it at all. Dorry tied his scout scarf on a stick and held it up, and when it blew out straight we got a strong whiff, and the crackling was louder. Sometimes it blew around the other way, up the mountain. Sometimes we couldn’t smell anything at all, but mostly we could hear the crackling a little. It was too dark to see any smoke and there wasn’t any blaze. Harry said he guessed it was pretty far away. He said the breeze could carry the smell a long distance.

“It couldn’t carry the sound so far, though,” I said.

“Trouble is, a stiff breeze can carry most anything,” Harry said; “well, let’s move along and rescue the maidens.”

Just then Hunt Manners said, “Listen!”

Far off we could hear the whistle of a locomotive and a kind of rattling, not very clear, but I knew it was the rattling of a train.

“That’s ’way over at the Hudson,” Harry said; “shows you how far sound will carry in the night.”

Just then I looked at Dorry’s scarf that was tied on the stick, and I saw it was blowing the way we were going—up the mountain.

I said, “That’s why we hear the train; the breeze is blowing from the east. But I can’t hear the crackling now.”

“Guess the breeze is blowing that up the mountain, too,” Harry said.

Then we started up the trail again toward the summit.