“Of course you don’t, and I shan’t keep you on tenterhooks another minute. You’re going to Colorado with Dick and me.”
“Who—who said I was?”
“Mr. William Starbuck said so—and he meant it. Dick and I are going to put in the whole summer prospecting in the Hophra Mountains for tungsten, bauxite, and the chrome-bearing ores. Uncle Billy is financing the job, and he came down here to-day especially to ask Dick if he didn’t want to pick out a couple of his classmates for bunkies and go to it. It will be simply one long picnic; big woods, big mountains, big game if we want it, and camping out all summer long.”
“Y-yes,” stammered little Purdick, “but—but where do I come in?”
Larry laughed uproariously, in a fashion that Old Sheddon had taught him.
“By the door of the cooking fire, if anybody should ask you. The minute Uncle Billy said ‘a couple of your classmates’ Dick grabbed for you. So, any time you get sore at us, you can square things by starving us to death. Neither Dick nor I could cook a decent meal, not if our lives depended on it. And, oh, boy! when you come back after a summer in our good old mountains, your best friend won’t know you. If we don’t put some meat on those little old rat’s bones of yours it’ll be the queerest thing that ever happened, in the Hophras or out of ’em. Come on and let’s get your trunk out. We catch the five-o’clock Limited in the morning. For, of course, you are going with us?”
“Going?” said little Purdick, and his pale blue eyes were shining; “I’d crawl on my hands and knees all the way to Colorado to get the chance to go!” Then: “Oh, gosh, Larry! a whole summer out of doors: you don’t know what that means to me. If—if you’ll just haul off and give me a swift kick, so that I’ll know I’m not asleep and dreaming——”
“I know,” Larry laughed. “That was just the way I felt when Uncle Billy fired it at Dick and me over yonder in the hotel. But it’s all wool and a yard wide. We go and you go. Now get to work on that trunk or it’ll be midnight before we can begin to cork it orf in our ’ammicks. For it’s Westward Ho! with a rumbelow, and—and—oh, shucks! I never can remember the rest of it. Get busy and pack!”