“Douglas, of course! The others can’t hold a candle to her, although Helen is some looker and Nan has certainly got something about her that makes a fellow kind of blink. And that Lucy is going to grow up to her long legs some day and maybe step ahead of all of them.”
“Well, I’m mighty glad you thought about giving me this job of working for such nice gals.” These young men always spoke of themselves as being in the employ of the Carter girls, and all the time they were building the camp they religiously kept themselves to certain hours as though any laxity would be cheating their bosses. Besides, the regular habits that two years at West Point had drilled into them would have been difficult to break.
“I don’t know how to loaf,” complained Lewis. “That’s the dickens of it.”
“Me, neither!”
“They say the Government makes machines of its men.”
“True! I am a perpetual motion machine.”
They were busily engaged on their first morning in the mountains, plying pick and shovel. They bent their brave young shoulders to the task with evident enjoyment in the work. When they did straighten up to get the kinks out of their backs, they looked out across a wonderful country which they fully appreciated as being wonderful, but raving about landscapes and Nature was not in their line and they would quickly bend again to the task in a somewhat shamefaced way.
The orchards of Albemarle County in Virginia are noted and the green of an apple tree in May is something no one need be ashamed to admire openly, but all these boys would say on the subject was:
“Good apple year, I hope.”