“Oh, no, sir, I live in Massachusetts. I learned how to camp as a Boy Scout. My chum—another scout—and I came out here this summer, because I was—I wasn’t very well. He’s got a job at Many Glacier tepee camp, and I’m getting so well now Mr. Mills got me to go as cook, ’cause I’d made coffee and things for him and he knew I could cook.”
“I suppose you learned cooking as a scout, too, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe answered, pouring out the ground coffee into the pot. “I worked to get a merit badge in cooking. You see, I could help mother with it, too, when she was sick, or anything.”
“Well, I’m beginning to have a better opinion of the Boy Scouts every minute,” the man laughed, sniffing the food and warming his hands by the blaze. “I thought it was just a kind of fad.”
“Oh, no, sir!” Joe cried. “Why, all our little scouts, after a year, are lots better boys, and everybody says it’s been a fine thing for the town!”
“Here, daddy, you stop bribing the cook to give you breakfast in advance!” a laughing voice interrupted them. Joe turned, and saw Lucy Elkins coming from her tent. Her hair was down her back, in brown waves, so that she looked almost like a little girl, and she was smiling and bright and gay as the morning sun.
“I suppose you slept well,” her father said, “weren’t cold and no pine boughs in your ribs.”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I slept so hard I can’t tell whether I was cold or not. But I know I’m hungry. Why don’t you wake everybody up, Joe, and let’s get to business.”
She went off up the brook with her tooth-brush and towel, and the Ranger, taking a pan, beat reveille on it with two sticks. Other sleepy heads emerged, Mrs. Jones last of all, looking very cross and shivery. By the time they had all got fully dressed and washed, and the girls had braided their hair (letting the braids hang down their backs), the two guides appeared. They had spent the night just down the lake at the Sun Camp chalets, with other guides, friends of theirs.
Joe set his eggs to cooking last of all, got the dishes ready, poured the coffee, and then gave the now familiar yell,