"Let it," said Jake promptly. "He'll have to git along without me to-day. I had to leave Aaron haul a while still. She'll pay me as much fer driving you all as I git a day haulin', and it leaves my team work yet. I like to be obligin'."
The Scollards laughed, Jake did not see why, but he was used to their laughing when the fun was invisible to him.
"'A wand'ring minstrel I, a thing of shreds and patches,'" sang Robert, drawing his yellow and red quilt, lent by Rosie, around his shoulders. One of Robert's gifts was a very good voice.
This started the choir and the party sang as the sled went briskly up the gradual rise in the road to the mountains where the many large hotels made in themselves, and drew around them, a very different summer life from the indigenous life of the section.
It was intensely cold, but there was no more wind, and the air was so dry that the blood flowed faster and off-set the lowly thermometer. People came out to look as the musical sled spun past, for it carried an amateur choir of unusual ability; and the harmony sounded so beautiful through the frosty air that many a listener wished the horses would loiter before his door.
It was unpleasantly cold coming home. "The wind is right up from the Gap," said Gretta. "There's a storm coming."
"This isn't much fun," remarked Penny, with stifled pathos, from the depths of her eclipse under enveloping skirts, quilts, shawls and robes. "I wish I was home."
"I don't," said Polly stoutly. "I think it's nice to be very uncomfortable when you go out for fun—sometimes, I mean—so you'll know how awful it is when it isn't fun." A shout of laughter greeted this philosophical seeker after experience.
"We'd better sing, 'In the Good Old Summer-time,' and see if we can't mind-cure ourselves into warmth," said Bob with a shiver.