“But the tips won’t be for me, they’ll be for old Joey,” said Tom.
“Exactly. And they will be given to you for work you do. They will really be your pay, for you won’t get much other pay. It all depends on how you take them. If you serve people who don’t give you tips as well and as cheerfully as you serve the others, it will be all right. We’ve got to get Joe well, and we can’t pick and choose. So I’ll put it up to you. I guess I can trust you not to become a tip hog. And if you find any better way to earn Joe’s keep out there, where you won’t have to take tips to get your living, you take it, won’t you?”
“You bet I will!” cried Tom. “Maybe I can become a—a cowboy, or something.”
Mr. Rogers smiled. “You’ll have to learn to ride a horse first.”
“Oh, I can ride a horse.”
“You may think you can, but after you’ve seen a real cowboy ride, you’ll know you’re only in the kindergarten class,” the scout master laughed.
Now that it seemed reasonably sure that he could get Joe to the Rockies, and find a way to live after they got there, Tom went at the task of arranging the strawberry festival. Of course, he made Bob Sawtelle chairman of the “festival committee,” because it was Bob’s idea to start with. All the scouts whose fathers or mothers had strawberry beds were “rounded up,” and a list made of how many baskets could be expected. Little Tim Sawyer, who was clever with a pencil or brush, made several posters to hang in the post-office and the stores. Spider himself wrote some notices for the weekly paper. Mr. Martin, who owned Martin’s block, where the festival was to be held, promised them the hall rent free, and as the cream was promised to them, also, and the cakes were made by the mothers, about all they had to buy was the sugar.
“Oh, we’re forgetting the drinks!” Bob suddenly cried, “and the music! We can’t have a dance without music.”
Some of the high school girls, Joe’s classmates, promised to furnish the fruit punch, and serve it, too, so that was easily settled. The music—a pianist and two violins—the boys hired from a near-by town, at a cost of fifteen dollars. With the sugar and a few other little expenses, their total outlay was about twenty dollars. The affair was so well advertised, however, and all the scouts went around selling tickets for so many days in advance, that when the evening came (it was a fine night, too, in June), there were two hundred and fifty people in the hall, and the scouts who took tickets at the door were kept busy till their fingers ached. The strawberries were all used up, and Bob and Tom had to rush out to the drug store to buy ice-cream for some of the late comers. That cut into part of their profits, but of course they could not refuse to give something to eat to the people who had paid for it. When the hard work of serving all these people was over, and the dancing had begun, Bob and Tom took all the money into a back room, and counted it up. With the musicians and the sugar paid for, and the ice-cream from the druggist’s, there was left a little over ninety dollars clear profit.
“Hooray!” cried Tom, “that’ll get old Joey to Glacier Park easy! Now, if I could only hear from my application for a job, we’d start next Monday. School is over. Gosh, there’s no sense hanging ’round here.”