Half an hour later they were at the station, Mills was telephoning to Park headquarters at Lake McDonald, and the boys were getting their accumulated mail—letters from home, newspapers for two months past, a big box of cakes and sweet chocolate for Tom from his mother, and, for Joe, a long letter from Lucy Elkins, enclosing the pictures she had taken on their trip.
That evening they slept in beds at the house of the station agent, after they had spent the evening hearing the news from the outside world. The mass of newspapers they kept to read in the long evenings back in the cabin. Laying in some additional provisions, and carefully packing their precious papers, they started back in the morning, over their old tracks, which, except in windy places where they were drift covered, afforded now pretty easy sledding for the toboggan. They made camp again in the same spot, and were up before daylight for the last stage, Mills looking scowlingly at the sky.
“Don’t like it to-day, boys,” he said. “We’re in for a storm. Let’s beat it home, if we can.”
And that day he gave them little rest, driving on at a fast pace, with the toboggan rope straining over his shoulder. The sun went under before noon. By mid-afternoon, as they entered the Swift Current valley mouth, the peaks of the Divide were lost in a cold, gun metal cloud, and the wind was rising. They faced this wind all up the valley, with no chance now to coast—only a steady, grinding up-hill pull.
It was dark long before they got to the cabin, and the snow had begun to fall in fine, stinging flakes. They were a cold, weary lot when finally they tugged their load up the last grade to the level of the lake, passed into the trees at the tepee camp, and a few minutes later tumbled into the cold cabin, and began to pile wood into the stove.
“Well, Joe, get a hunk of that venison out, and let’s forget this day!” Mills cried. “Light up the big lamp, Tom. We’ve got kerosene enough, too. Let’s be cheerful.”
The roar of the logs in the stove, the light of the lamp, and presently the smell of food and coffee, acted like magic. They were soon laughing again, while the wind rose outside, and the trees groaned and creaked, and the snow drove with a kind of hissing patter against the windows and the roof.
“A hundred miles in four days, over four feet of snow, and pulling a toboggan—gosh, if anybody’d told me old Joe could do that last May, I’d have thought he was crazy,” said Tom.
“You couldn’t have done it yourself last May,” Joe replied.
“And,” said the Ranger, stretching out his legs and rubbing them, “by golly, I don’t want to do it again!”