He looked at his watch.
“Gee whiz, we’ve been gone ’most two hours already!” he cried. Then he looked up at the cliff above, which was almost perpendicular. The girls looked at it, too. Joe looked at it, and longed for Spider and a rope to tackle it. But he did not see how any one could safely climb it without a rope. Mills looked at the four of them—and still smiled.
“Well,” he said, finally, “going on?”
“You win,” Bob admitted reluctantly. “We’re the goats.”
“No, the trouble is, we’re not!” laughed Lucy. “If we were, we could keep on.”
So they started back, sliding down a snow-field by sitting down and “letting her go”—which was rapid, but very damp.
“The goats win,” said Bob, as they reached camp almost three hours later.
“And yet we could see you all the way,” his father said “Now I realize what Rocky Mountain air is.”
That night they had a big camp-fire, and a sing—all the songs every one knew, with Val playing on a harmonica he fished sheepishly out of his saddle-bag. Then they all “turned in” early, to be ready for a long trip the next day.