“Say,” it called, “what had we better do?”
“Keep in your blankets and hang onto your tent!” Mills shouted back.
“I wonder if he thinks we can call a taxi and drive to a hotel!” he added in a normal tone, that couldn’t have been heard two feet beyond the tent flap.
Nobody slept any more in either tent that night. They were too cold, and too busy bailing out snow that drifted under the tent walls, or trying to peg down the walls or stop up the gaps with the balsam beds. Finally, toward morning, there came a perfect hurricane of wind. The tent the scouts were in swayed, tugged, seemed about to leave its moorings, and in the midst of the gust the occupants heard a snapping sound outside, and a smothered yell.
Mills sprang out into the storm, and a moment later came back with Robert and the two men, all wrapped in their blankets, and powdered white by the brief crossing.
Their tent pole had snapped, and the tent had come down on top of them! There was no chance of getting it up again then, so the six people all huddled in the one tent, and waited for daylight.
“Anyhow, the more we are, the warmer we can keep,” said Robert, who was rather enjoying the adventure. “Go on, Joe, keep your knee in my back, I like it! It’s as good as a hot water bottle.”
The storm began to abate presently, and as the light brightened outside, Mills, peering out, reported that the snow had stopped falling. With the diminution of the wind, too, the cold lessened, and the noise, and nearly everybody, in spite of the cramped quarters, fell into a troubled, rather restless sleep.
What woke Joe up was the bright daylight hitting him in the eye through a crack in the tent flap.
He extricated himself from between Robert and Mr. Taylor, and pushed his way out. It was a transformed, a wonderful, a beautiful world he looked on! Evidently the sun was up over the prairie, for far down Mineral Creek Cañon he could see the top of Cannon Mountain, snow covered, pink and rosy with the light, and Heaven’s Peak, a little nearer, was like a great pyramid of gleaming rose crystal. On the ground about him, half covering his fire pit, was almost a foot of snow, which hung on the balsams, was drifted over the fallen tent, covered the rocks, and through which, here and there, rose the stems of wild flowers, their blossoms nodding above the white carpet!