here.”

“So far as that goes, it always pays to keep your eyes open when afoot in the Tall Timber,” Elmer warned him. “You never know what you may run up against any minute; and preparedness is the right bower of every woodsman worthy of the name. Already we’ve run across three instances of this—first there was that crouching cat Amos frightened off with his flashlight; then came the mysterious party who slipped away from the cabin at our approach; and now this venomous snake that was lying coiled in your path, and on which you might have trod unawares only for his generous warning.”

“This ought to be a good lesson to me, Elmer,” humbly admitted the contrite Perk. “I realize that I’m a whole lot short on woods lore, and all those things some of my fine pards know so much about; but I mean to soak in a wheen of the same while we’re up here in camp. Yes, every time I shake this rattle it’ll remind me how wofully lacking I am in scoutcraft, and everything connected with life in the woods.”

“Everything perhaps except the splendid art of cookery, Perk,” remarked the cunning Wee Willie, adroitly feeding the ambition of the other to shine as an artist along such lines; “there you’ve got the bunch of us left at the post.”

“Yes,” remarked the other, with a puff of unconscious pride, while his eyes fairly sparkled with pleasure at receiving such a compliment, “I suppose a fellow can’t be up head in everything; where one excels, another fails to hit the mark. And perhaps it’s just as well that I have a knack for the noble culinary art.”

Perk went back to camp with the others, as though for the time being his desire to look around had received a decided setback.

“I’ll come out and put the ugly thing underground later on,” he said; “for such trash ought to be buried deep, so as to keep the air around the camp sweet and pure. I burned some insect powder inside the cabin, you may have noticed, just to get rid of that stale odor we took to come from rank tobacco. It’s a disinfectant in the bargain.”

“That’s right, Perk,” assented Wee Willie, promptly; “anyway, it almost disinfected me when I poked my head indoors a while back, to see if there might be any cavity we’d overlooked. Made the tears come, too, so that Elmer he asked me, when I got back on the roof, if I’d had any bad news from home. But then I left the door wide open, so it’ll gradually pass away, let’s hope.”

The two menders of leaky roofs were soon at 

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