“So’s mine,” said Spider.
“You’ve got so much air in mine I’ll have a blowout,” said Uncle Billy.
“Gee, think of all that work for nothing!” Bennie groaned.
If anybody had been outside the tent, he would have heard three little hisses as they let some air out of their beds. Then, three minutes later, he would have heard three people breathing in sound slumber.
CHAPTER VII
Held Up by the Snow, With the Thermometer at 86°
The next day, sure enough Uncle Billy routed everybody out at five o’clock. They had pancakes and syrup, and bacon and coffee and toast for breakfast, and then camp had to be struck and the cars packed again. The sleeping bags had to be deflated and rolled up by the three boys, and put in their canvas cases. The tents had to be rolled up and also put in cases. The dunnage bags had to be repacked, the dishes washed and put into the boxes on Uncle Billy’s car. It was long after seven before they got away.
On this day, at last, they began to get a taste of wild Oregon—but just a taste, the doctor told them. They finally came to the head of the Willamette valley, and climbed up a long grade, beside a wild, tumbling stream, amid huge old fir trees, and then down a long, wooded cañon on the farther side. They rolled through more valleys full of fruit orchards, and they passed through several towns. In one of them, where they stopped to get an ice cream soda—or rather ice cream sodas, for both the scouts had two apiece and Dumplin’ had three—a big banner was stretched across the street, with the words on it in letters two feet high:
IT’S THE CLIMATE.
“Golly, you wouldn’t think they had any climate anywhere else,” said Bennie. “Out here, you’ve only got one kind. In little old Massachusetts we have every kind.”
“Sure, and on the same day, too,” Uncle Billy laughed.