He drifted off to sleep clutching his new honor, and when he awoke at dawn, rose and sewed it carefully on the front of the sweater that he would wear on the trail. Brick Ryan was astir too, dressing in his worn hiking clothes and rolling his blankets into a neat pack to be strapped over his shoulders. He winked over at Dirk and whispered: “The pennant is still safe, by gollies! I pinned it to my pajama shirt with a big blanket-pin!”
The eight trailers were off up the mountainside before nine o’clock, after a brief but thorough inspection by their leader. They travelled in close marching order, for as Sagamore Wise-Tongue explained, they were like a war-party and must not lose their strength through straggling or getting out of touch with each other. It might be necessary, when they were in wilder country, to put out scouts, but since the road to Indian Glen was well known to them, they would take it in regular stages.
Although Dirk’s unaccustomed blanket-roll was heavy and grew heavier as the morning wore on, his heart was light. He joined in the songs of the gay trailers as they threaded their way through the trees on the slope above camp, pausing as they reached the road at Fiddler’s Elbow and taking a last glance at the placid waters of the lake and the white tents they were leaving behind. Dirk laughed aloud as he thought of all the adventures he would have before he again caught sight of Camp Lenape. But had he guessed that his life would be more than once in wild danger on the path that lay before him, he might well have shivered instead.
Up and down, over one ridge after another of the Lenape range, the boys took their way, resting now and then for a few moments in the shade beside some bubbling mountain spring. Mr. Carrigan, in the lead, bearing a first-aid kit and many other necessities in the knapsack over which his blankets were strapped, strode along silently, ever on the alert for some wilderness creature that he might point out to his eager followers. Once he pointed out the marks of a fox, and several times their progress stirred up a covey of stupid, drumming partridge. And in one breathless instant, before they came to the end of the forest, he paused and pointed through the trees. Dirk caught a glimpse of a swift-moving dun-colored animal that with a flick of its stubby tail was off in long easy leaps to the shelter of the far thickets—a young deer, the first he had ever seen in its native haunts.