Joe laughed.
“I thought I was, the first day over Piegan,” said he. “But the old Rockies fooled me. I slept, all right. So’ll you.”
And Tom did. In fact, it is doubtful if he heard the tail end of Joe’s sentence.
CHAPTER XVIII—Joe Gets Good News From the Doctor, And The Scouts Name Their Camp, “Camp Kent”
The next morning Dr. Kent arrived, rather cross, at the boys’ camp, for the hikers had waked him up early, and he told Joe nothing but a good breakfast would set the world right. Joe did his best, and then put up some lunch for him, and he went off presently in better spirits, to spend the day, as he put it, “loafing with the wild flowers and inviting my soul.” Joe also cooked his dinner when he returned at night. The next day, he said, would be his last, and he insisted that Tom go with him up on Grinnell Glacier.
“We’ll have a little more practice with the rope,” he said, “and you can see if you can tumble into a crevasse the way your friend Joe did.”
So Joe, for a second time, took charge of the camp, and Tom left with the doctor, bright and early. It wasn’t a hard climb up to the glacier, and they crossed it, using Tom’s scout axe for cutting steps when necessary, and the doctor sent Tom ahead a little way up a cliff, and then reversed positions on the rope, and let Tom take number two position. They climbed far enough up on the great gray shoulder of Gould Mountain to look down on the glacier, on the lake far below that, on the green meadow, and then returned leisurely to camp.
On the way back Tom got up courage to ask Dr. Kent what he had been longing to ask him ever since he learned of his profession. That was, to examine Joe. He told his new friend of Joe’s condition, and why they were in the Park, and how he was responsible for him, and did not want him to go on trips and do hard work if it wasn’t safe.
“I’ll see if I can borrow a stethoscope from the hotel,” Dr. Kent said. “There must be a house physician there. Then I’ll give him the once over, gladly. Anybody who can make coffee like his mustn’t be allowed to die! But he doesn’t look like a sick boy to me.”
True to his word, he got the instrument, and before dinner took Joe into the scouts’ tent, stripped him, and examined him very carefully.