A shout showed that they had been sighted from the camp and they answered with an Indian whoop. They piled eagerly down across the campus and were welcomed enthusiastically by their classmates who started out the night before and by Professor Mertz, who had come up the previous week to get the place in shape.
They all sat down on the library porch and made a preliminary survey of the campus. The lake shore, not over a hundred feet away, stretched north and south; across a quarter-mile of shining water the opposite shore, part birch, part swamp, part pine. The roof of the boathouse peeped over the bank directly in front of them, the big log bunkhouse loomed up to the north, and hidden in the trees to the south were the four small cabins of the faculty. It was a beautiful picture even then, but nothing to what it would be when the trees were in leaf and all the vegetation green.
“Looks pretty fine,” Merton said, “but, what’s more important, how do you like the looks of the cook?”
“Fine,” came the chorus; “he moved in as naturally as though he had always belonged here and has a hand-out waiting for you now.”
“’Nough said,” cried Bill, and they all arose as one man. “Let’s go see the cookshack.”
The cook, who had held despotic sway over many a lumber camp, was waiting for them in the doorway and greeted them cheerily. It was hard to realize that he had never seen any of them before.
“Not much in the way of chuck, yet,” he apologized, “but I got some flour at the store, and there’s bread and butter and cheese and the teapot is on the stove.”
The newcomers dropped into the benches without more ado and ate ravenously.
“Looks like five dollars a plate to me,” Morris chuckled between bites. “I could die eating like this.”
“Chances are pretty good that you will,” Bill purred, “you put in more time at that than anything else.”