On a sizzling hot afternoon near the middle of August, in the year nineteen eleven, three boys dressed in the khaki uniform of the Boy Scouts of America stood on a lofty plateau near the British frontier, watching with anxious eyes the broken country to the south and west. "Nothing stirring yet " Jack Bosworth said, turning to Pat Mack and Frank Shaw, his companions. "Ned and Jimmie may be in trouble somewhere. I wish we had waited and traveled with them." "Traveled with them " repeated Frank Shaw. "We couldn't travel with them. We were fired-given the grand bounce-twenty-three sign. Ned seemed to want the space in the atmosphere we occupied at Missoula. Serve them good and right if they do get distributed over the scenery." "Never you mind about Ned Nestor and Jimmie McGraw," Pat Mack put in. "They can get along all right if someone isn't leading them by the hand. Suppose we fix up the camp and get ready for our eats?" The boys turned away from the lip of the canon upon which they had been standing and busied themselves putting up shelter tents and unpacking provisions and camping tools, as they called their blankets and cooking vessels. They had passed the previous night in a sheltered valley lower down, sleeping on the ground, under the stars, and had breakfasted from the scanty stock of eatables carried in their haversacks. Early that morning a train of burros had landed their outfit at the end of a rough trail some distance below, and the boys, with long labor and patience, had carried it up to the plateau."