“Father looks as scared as when he made his first speech in the House,” laughed Miss Elkins.
“Nonsense!” said that statesman. “I rode a horse many a time when I was a boy.”
“That was a long time ago, papa dear,” his daughter said.
“And pray when did you learn to ride?” her father asked, trying to get comfortable in his saddle.
“Oh, it’s just going to come natural to me,” she answered, with one of her rippling laughs that Joe liked to hear.
Mills walked through the little group of mounted riders, gave a testing pull to all the saddle girths, looked at the stirrups, and vaulted into his own saddle.
“You keep the two horses with the dunnage bags, and our own packhorse, in front of you, just behind the last rider,” he said to Joe. Then he touched his horse with his heel, and the animal jumped up the trail. The rest followed—first the party of tourists, behind Mills, then one of the guides to keep an eye on them, then three packhorses, then Joe to keep an eye on these three, then the five other packhorses, and finally the second guide to watch them. In all, then, there were nineteen horses strung out along the trail in single file, which made a considerable procession, as Joe looked forward and then back upon it.
The trail they were on did not go past the tepee camp, so Joe had no chance to call good-bye to Tom. It went along the other shore of Lake McDermott, sometimes on the little rocky beach, sometimes almost in the water, heading directly up the valley toward the great gray fortress of Gould Mountain and Grinnell Glacier, which Joe could see glistening like a huge white and green silk mantle flung along a high ledge just under the spine of the Continental Divide. Mills broke into a trot as soon as the party was well started, and ahead Joe could see the two congressmen and their wives bounding up and down, and noticed that Congressman Elkins, who said he rode when he was a boy, bounded quite as much as any one. Of course, the packhorses wanted to trot, too, and Joe saw the guide in front turning back and gesticulating to him. He gave Popgun a jab in the ribs, and rode past his three charges, getting in front of them, and then pulled Popgun down to a walk. If he had not, of course, the packs might soon have been shaken off. The tourists were soon out of sight up the trail, in the woods, and Joe and Val, the young cowboy, were left alone, with the eight pack animals.
It looked like an easy job they had, too, but Joe soon found it was not so easy as it looked. Some one of the eight was always wanting to fall out of line and eat a particularly tempting bunch of grass, or else took it into his silly head to make a détour into the woods, and then he had to be yelled at, or chased and driven into line again. Joe found himself fairly busy most of the first four miles of the trail, till they reached Grinnell Meadow, where the rest of the party had halted and were waiting for them.
Grinnell Meadow, Joe thought, was the most beautiful place he had ever been in. It was a grassy glade of twenty acres, at the foot of Grinnell Lake, and was studded with little fir trees and carpeted with great white chalice cups, which are a kind of big anemone. The lake itself was green in color, and maybe half a mile across. The far side lay right under a two thousand foot precipice which sprang up to the glacier, and down this precipice, from under the lip of the glacier, were pouring half a dozen very slender waterfalls, like long white ribbons let down the rocks. Just to the left the vast cliff wall of Mount Gould shot straight up to the almost ten thousand foot summit. (Of course, the meadow being five or six thousand feet above sea level, this wall of Gould wasn’t ten thousand feet high, but only about four thousand.)