“You bet!” said Joe. “And eighteen dollars more for me and ma.”
“You’re getting terribly practical,” Tom laughed.
“I’m getting self-supporting,” Joe replied. “No more grafting off you.”
“You’re getting well,” Tom cried. “That’s the real thing. Gee, you’re harder’n I am now! You never seem to get tired.”
“Bet I can hit the little old cot, though,” Joe laughed, as he began to make up the beds in the tent.
CHAPTER XXIV—The Boys Prepare for Winter in the Park, and Learn Why the Timber-Line Trees Are Only Three Feet Tall
It was now September, and already a rain in the valleys meant fresh snow on the peaks and high passes. The hotel was still full, however, and Tom was busy at the tepees, while Joe had steady work as a camp cook, once on a fishing trip, when, in three days, he cooked so many trout he said he should be ashamed ever to look a fish in the face again, and sick if he ate one.
“I didn’t think it was possible to get fed up on trout,” he declared.
“Wait till next April, and you’ll be out whipping up Roaring Brook, all right, all right,” Tom laughed.
Of course school had begun back in Southmead, but Tom did not feel like quitting his job before the season was over, and, besides, after long talks together, and consultations with the Ranger, and letters home to their parents and Mr. Rogers, the boys had decided to stay on with Mills, in his cabin (paying for their own food, of course, which would be a very small item), until Christmas. It would mean that they’d lose the whole school term instead of a month, but, in return, Joe would have that much more outdoor life, they could do a lot of reading evenings, and, above all, they could learn from Mills some of the duties of a forest ranger in winter, and learn how to handle themselves in the mountains and big woods after all trails were closed, all tourists departed, and the Park had gone back to its primitive wildness.