The third day Mills was feeling better, and grew restless.
“You stay where you are,” the doctor laughed, “and thank young Tom who got me, and Joe who dosed you till I came, that you’re alive at all! I’ve got to go to-morrow, but Jerry will stay with you and feed you according to schedule till you’re O.K. again.”
“I suppose that means the boys are going to-morrow, too,” Mills answered. “They—they got to be home for Christmas. Say, doc, can’t you make ’em just sick enough so they’ll have to stay?”
The doctor laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe I can get you transferred to headquarters till you’re all right again,” he said. “Then you won’t miss the boys so much.”
But if it was hard for the Ranger to part with Tom and Joe, it was scarcely less hard for them to leave him, even if it did mean getting home to their families for Christmas, yet they could not put it off a day longer, because already they had just time to make connections at Chicago and reach home on Christmas morning. The Ranger’s sickness had delayed them.
So Tom and Joe began to pack. They had long realized they would have to leave some day, and in mid-winter, so they had sent home by express all their summer clothes and their balloon silk tent and their folding cots, in their trunks, by the last bus out in October. But they still had a big load. All the books, except a few school books, they left for Mills. Most of their clothes they put on. The two sleeping-bags and the snow-shoes, which belonged to the Ranger, they were to leave with the station agent. Their bearskin caps and coats, which Mills had procured for them, he made them keep as a present, and Tom, for a present to him, left his skis behind. Joe left as his present the warm, soft bed puff he had used ever since he came to the Park, and his aluminum coffee-pot, to take the place of the battered old tin one Mills used.
They packed the toboggan that night, to be ready for an early start, and then sat around the stove for the last time, in the little cabin. The doctor and the other Ranger did all the talking. Mills, who lay on the couch, and the boys did not feel like saying a word.
The next morning Joe cooked the last breakfast. Poor Mills was not allowed to drink any coffee.
“I’m goin’ to drink tea after this, anyhow, Joe,” he said. “You’ve spoiled my taste for my own coffee, confound you.”