“Bet you hear to-morrow,” said Bob. “I wish I was going, too, Spider.”
“Come along,” cried Tom. “It’s going to be great. I’m going to get a job as a guide, or something, when I get out there and learn the ropes, and climb all over the mountains and maybe see a goat or a grizzly bear!”
“Well, you bring me a bearskin for a rug, and we’ll call it quits,” Bob answered. “I guess next year I’ll get up a strawberry festival for myself. Maybe I can get sick, or something, this winter.”
“A lot you can, you old fatty,” Tom laughed. “You look about as sick as—as a pig before killing.”
Bob nearly upset the pile of money, trying to reach for Tom’s head, to punch it.
Sure enough, the very next day Tom did hear from his application. He rushed over to Mr. Rogers’ studio.
“Look,” he cried. “I get a job all right, but I don’t know just what it means. It says I’m to be in charge of the Many Glacier tepee camp, if I turn out to be big enough, and suit the boss. Otherwise, I’ll be a bellhop in the Many Glacier Hotel. I’ll get forty dollars a month and board at the camp. What’s a tepee camp?”
“You know as much about it as I do,” the scout master said. “I suppose it’s a camp composed of Indian tepees, which the hotel rents to people who’d rather camp out than stay inside. Anyhow, I hope you get that job, for I don’t like to think of one of my scouts taking tips all the time, the way a bellhop gets to do. It’s un-American. Probably Joe could help you ’round the tepee camp, anyway with the cooking. And speaking of Joe, the first thing we must do is to take him ’round to Dr. Meyer’s again, and find out just what he can and can’t do, and what you’ve got to feed him, and so forth. Suppose we go right now.”
The doctor gave Joe another thorough examination, from head to foot, and then put him on the scales. He smiled as the weight had to be pushed twelve pounds beyond where it hung in May.
“You see what rest, food and minding the doctor does,” said he. “Well, my boy, you’re on the mend. As a matter of fact, there isn’t very much the matter with you now except a weakened condition and, of course, a tendency to relapse without proper care. A year in the Rocky Mountains ought to make a well man of you.”