He came to the door to help in the last packing of the toboggan. “If you’ve left anything, I’ll keep it till you come back next summer,” he said, trying to laugh.
“We’ll be back!” the scouts cried. “We’ll be rangers, too, some day, with you as our boss!”
“I’m goin’ to miss you something fierce, boys,” Mills added, taking each of them by the hand. “Tom, I can’t never thank you proper for what you did—so we’ll let it go at that. You’re a regular scout, and you and Joe’ll make good whatever you do, and Joe’ll keep as well as he is now, always.”
He turned his head suddenly away, and the boys felt a lump in their own throats.
Then they started.
When they looked back to wave, however, he was facing them, and they could see his pale, blue eyes—the eyes of a woodsman—looking at them as they went down the trail.
Opposite the entrance to their old camp, Joe dropped the rope, and ran down the path, to the surprise of Tom and the doctor. He came back with their rough sign, “Camp Kent,” and stuck it into the load.
“Gee, if we’d forgotten that for a souvenir!” he cried.
Tom gave the doctor some wild rides on the toboggan in the next two days, while Joe took the hills on skis. They camped that night in the same woods as before, only this time they had no tent, only such protection as they could hastily rig up by making a rough lean-to of evergreen boughs and crawling under it in their sleeping-bags. Each one took a watch to keep the fire going during the night, and they managed to come through fairly comfortably, though it was bitterly cold. However, they were up long before the sun, and on their way.
The second day the boys knew they were seeing the mountains for the last time, and as they passed by old Rising Wolf, his red rocks buried under glistening snow, they loitered a little on the trail and walked with their eyes turned upward and toward the west.