“We need not pitch the tents, as you scouts can sleep in the wagon, and we three men will stretch out beside the campfire. Tally can pull in at the first good clearing we find along the way,” explained Mr. Gilroy.
“If we bunk in the wagon, we’ll have to stretch out in a row,” remarked Joan.
“We’ll look like a lot of dolls on the shelf of a toy-shop,” giggled Julie.
“I don’t want to sleep next to you, Julie—you’re such a kicker in your sleep,” complained Betty. Everybody laughed at the sisters, and Anne said:
“I don’t mind kicks, as I never feel them when I’m asleep.”
Tally had brought canned and prepared food for just such an emergency as an unexpected camp; so now the supper was quickly cooked and the travelers called to enjoy it.
Night falls swiftly in the mountains, and even though the day may have been warm, the nights in the Rockies are cold. A fire is always a comfort, so when supper was over the scouts sat around the fire, thoroughly enjoying its blaze.
The late afterglow in the sky seemed to hover over the camp as if reluctant to fade away and leave the scouts in the dark. The atmosphere seemed tinged with orchid tints, and a faint, almost imperceptible white chill pervaded the woods.
“Girls,” said Mr. Gilroy, “we have shelter, food and clothing enough, in this wonderful isolation of Nature—is there anything more that humans can really secure with all their struggling for supremacy? Is not this life in grand communion with Mother Nature better than the cliff-dwellers in great cities ever have?”
Mrs. Vernon agreed thoroughly with him and added, “Yes, and man can have, if he desires it, this sublime and satisfying life in the mountains, where every individual is supreme over all he surveys—as the Creator willed it to be.”