“Paul Bentley!” cried Joe. “What does he have to say? How are things going with the old scout?”
“Is he coming to Clintonia?” asked Herb Fennington, eagerly.
“No such luck,” Bob replied to the last question. “Say, maybe he wouldn’t get a welcome if he did! No, he’s still up in the Spruce Mountain district, fighting fires. Says they had a big one a couple of weeks ago, almost as bad as the one in which we fellows came so near to losing our lives.”
“It must have been a lallapaloozer then,” affirmed Jimmy. “I never believed anything could be nearly as bad as that. Gee, I feel hot flashes whenever I think of it. And I think of it pretty often, too. Sometimes I wake up in the night and begin sniffing around for smoke.”
“Same here,” chimed in Joe. “Whenever there was a fire in town I used to like to run to it. But not any more! I’ve had enough of fires to last me a lifetime.”
“We did have a pretty tough fight for life,” assented Bob. “What with the fire on one hand and the bears on the other, we had a mighty sight more of excitement than we bargained for.”
“Yet that’s what we went to Spruce Mountain to get,” observed Joe Atwood.
“We got it all right,” remarked Jimmy. “And yet, since we got out of it safely, I’m mighty glad we had the experience. And leaving the fire out of the account, what a whale of a good time we had! Good air, good eats, good company. Everything was good.”
“Everything?” queried Herb, with a tinge of skepticism.
“Sure!” declared Jimmy, stoutly. “Point out anything that wasn’t.”