The big fellow turned from his window. “You’re sure he got in last night?” he said.
“Oh, yes; they came in on the Flyer. Aunt Stella called mother over the ’phone after the train got in—just to let us know. But I wish he’d come. We don’t want to lose another single day of this bully weather.”
Dick Maxwell’s impatience was not altogether unreasonable. Ten days earlier Mr. William Starbuck—the “Uncle Billy” in question—had made a short stop in the Middle-Western college town where Dick and his two companions were just winding up their Freshman year, and had asked Dick how he was meaning to spend the long vacation. One thing had brought on another, and the upshot of the talk was an offer on the part of “Uncle Billy” to send Dick, and any two of his college-mates he might pick out, on a summer prospecting trip in the Hophra Mountains, the object in view being the possible discovery, not especially of silver or gold, but more particularly of new sources of supply of the rare metals, tungsten, vanadium, molybdenum, and the like, used in the arts and manufactures.
Dick hadn’t wasted a moment in choosing the first of his companions for the summer outing. Larry Donovan—the big fellow at the office window—son of a crippled locomotive engineer on the home railroad, had been his chum from their grade-school days in Brewster, and the two had spent the preceding summer together as “cubs” on the engineering staff of the railroad of which Dick’s father was the general manager, so Larry was promptly elected as Number Two in the prospecting trip. For the third member they had both picked upon Charles Purdick—Larry’s roommate in college—for several reasons: for one thing, “Little Purdy” was a pretty good plain cook; and for another, he needed the wages that Mr. William Starbuck was going to pay each member of the prospecting party irrespective of the success of the trip in the discovery of any new mineral deposits.
But there was a third reason for Purdick’s invitation which was still stronger. “Purdy,” who, until he became the beneficiary of a certain mysterious scholarship in Old Sheddon, had been working his way through college, was the orphan son of a steel worker, and had grown up in a mill town, under-fed, neglected, kicked about and overworked. He had never been West; had never known what it was to have a real vacation in the open; and both Dick and Larry had decided at once that he was to be Number Three, even if they should have to knock him down and handcuff him to bring him along. But Purdy hadn’t needed any handcuffing.
Larry laughed good-naturedly at Dick’s miserly remark about the wasting of the “bully weather.”
“Don’t you worry about the weather, old scout,” he said. “We’ll take that as it comes, and you know well enough that we’re likely to have a lot more good weather than bad, in the summer months.”
“Oh, I guess yes,” was Dick’s rejoinder. “I’m just sweating to be off to the tall hills, that’s all.” Then to Purdick, who was busily writing in his notebook at the mineral cabinet: “What are you finding over there, Purdy?”
Purdick’s answer was forestalled by the entrance of Dick’s uncle by marriage, a bronzed, upstanding man who looked as if he might be a retired cattle king, and who really had been a range-rider in his younger days.
“Well, well! Here you are!” he said, shaking hands with the three. “Ready to go out and hit the high spots, are you? All right; sit down and we’ll round up the preliminaries—what few there are. Got your dunnage kits made up?”