“Come and get it!”
In a second he was surrounded. Sitting on large stones, or logs washed down by the spring floods in the brook, with their laps or other stones as tables, every one except Joe ate the piping hot soup. Then they had stew, on tin plates, with bread and coffee and jam, and while the stew was being eaten Joe tossed over the “saddle blankets” in his frying-pan.
“Why don’t you go into vaudeville with that act?” Bob called to him, as he flapped a cake up with the pan, and caught it neatly, other side down.
These they ate with butter from a jar and syrup from a tin can, which Joe had stocked at the Many Glacier store. Finally, he gave them preserved peaches for dessert.
“Poor Joe,” said Lucy, as he passed her dessert to her. “I don’t believe we’ve left a thing for you.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” Joe answered. “I have the supplies in my tent!”
She laughed, but he saw that she was watching to see if there really was any supper left for him, and it seemed very good to have some one thinking that way about you.
As a matter of fact, there was a little soup left, and a good big plate of stew, and all the jam he wanted, so Joe had no complaint. He sat behind his fire and devoured his supper hungrily, before he tackled the final job of cleaning up all the dishes.
It would have been quite dark at home by this time, for it was eight o’clock, or more, but up here it was still light enough to read, and as Joe took the dishes down to the brook to scour them with clean sand before he poured boiling water over them, he looked up into the west, and saw the great, towering pyramids of the mountains, blue against the sunset sky, with their snow patches and glaciers all rosy pink. The two girls were standing near him, and when they saw him looking, they said, “Isn’t it lovely?”
“I never saw anything so beautiful,” Joe answered, simply. “I like mountains, but these are such big ones, and there are so many colors in ’em!”