“Everything O.K. here?” Tom asked Joe. “These people got wood, and cots, and everything?”
“Sure—beat it, and wash your mug. Gee, you’re dirty!” Joe laughed.
“Well, I guess you’d be if you’d been kissin’ an old precipice all day,” Tom retorted. “Oh, gee, Joe—this is the life! Some climb! Some old goats and sheep! Some Park!”
“Yes, and go and wash up if you want some supper.”
Joe made sure the hikers had everything they needed or wanted, and hurried down the path to the scout camp, where he began to cook the supper, while Tom was having a wash and getting into dry underclothes and shirt. He had been to the chalet store that afternoon and restocked the larder, and secured a piece of a big, fresh steak which had just come in by motor bus. This he now broiled over as good a bed of coals as he could get from his soft wood fire. He had coffee already boiling, and hot soup, and some nice canned beans, and French fried potatoes, and a surprise for dessert—nothing less than four plates of fresh huckleberries, which he had stumbled upon while taking a walk that noon, and picked into his hat.
When Mills and the doctor arrived, this supper was all ready, and the two men and two boys sat down on the log seats around the rough table of boards, and ate and talked, and talked and ate, while the evening shadows crossed the lake and the lights of the big hotel could be seen twinkling through the trees. It was a jolly meal, and a good one, and Tom had never in his life felt so hungry, and deliciously lame and sore and tired, so that a long draught of hot coffee seemed to go warming and tingling through all his body.
After supper, Joe would not let him go back to the tepee camp, but went himself to see that everything was fixed for the night. Tom just sat by the blazing camp-fire, while Mills and Dr. Kent smoked, and listened to the talk of the two men, who swapped yarns about mountain climbing. The doctor had been up rock crags in the Austrian Tyrol, thrilling precipices steeper than the wall of Iceberg Lake, and he had climbed over ice and snow, also, where you had to cut steps with an ice axe. But Mills, who had never been east of Omaha in his life, had once ridden down a mountain on a snow avalanche, (needless to say, without intending to!) and had seen a mother goat standing over her kid on the ledge of a precipice fighting off a bald eagle. Tom listened with ears wide open, and though he was sleepy and tired, he was sorry when the men rose to depart.
“I’ll come here for breakfast, boys, if you don’t mind,” the doctor said. “Those hikers may be an estimable collection of citizens and citizenesses, but I came out here to get away from folks. Good-night, Tom. We’ll have to have one more climb before I go—day after to-morrow, I guess. To-morrow I’m going back to Iceberg Lake and look at the flowers more carefully. Good-night, Joe. Good-night, Mills. Thanks for coming to-day. You Rocky Mountain goat hunters don’t need any course of training in the Alps.”
“Good-night,” the scouts called, as the two men disappeared in opposite directions.
Tom told Joe all that had happened as they got ready for bed, and ended by declaring he was too excited still to go to sleep.