“Do I win that pop?” Sturgis called after them as they trailed away to the bunkhouse.
“You sure do,” Bill Price shouted back, “and I’ll bet you another case that I can sleep till tomorrow noon without waking up even to eat.”
Scott remembered how the fire swept roaring up that hill and dreamed all night that he was fighting just such fires sweeping up the mountain slopes of his own forest in New Hampshire. The fact that he might never get that forest made them seem none the less real.
CHAPTER XIV
For the next few days the adventures of that fire were the sole subject of conversation. Hazen, the official historian, devoted all his spare time to writing up the details in the official scrapbook and they lost nothing of their vividness in the process. It was wonderful, now that it was all over, to see how they had enjoyed that gruelling work on the fireline. Scott wrote home an account of the fire which perfectly confirmed his parents in their belief in the woolliness of the West, but left them undecided as to whether the fire had been a catastrophe narrowly prevented by almost superhuman efforts or a harmless scheme devised for the amusement of the students. Such were the views of the fire, now that it was past history and the frequent rains precluded its repetition, but it was a notable fact that throughout the remainder of the summer no one was heard to wish for another.
The ground had thawed out sufficiently for the nursery work and the boys were spending their days busily in the seed beds.
The novelty of the work in the nursery had made it interesting at first, but otherwise it was not very fascinating, and on the fourth day it was getting monotonous. Each crew of two had thoroughly spaded up a bed four feet wide by fifty feet long and had bordered them with boards on edge, which Professor Mertz required to be set with excruciating exactness. The boys declared that he could smell the slightest deviation in one of those boards.
The beds thus prepared had then to be covered with a layer of carefully prepared manure and that in turn covered with a layer of well sifted sandy loam. The dirt sifting soon became monotonous and monotony in that crowd necessitated some side line to keep up the interest. Fourteen ingenious minds were looking for some opportunity to put a little spice into the mechanical labor.
Morris straightened his long angular frame stiffly, stretching his tired arms over his head and gazing straight into the zenith in his effort to relax every muscle he had been straining over that sand sifter. The action exposed very prominently a leather thong attached to the ring of a large silver watch. The chance for a joke seemed slight, but it was no time to neglect the slightest opportunity. Bill Price grabbed the thong with the quickness of a cat and was surprised to find how easily the watch slipped from Morris’s pocket to his own.
Several saw the transfer and prepared to elaborate the joke. Hazen, working on the next bed, took a stretch. “Gee, but this is a long day. What time is it getting to be, Morris?”