“What on earth happened here?” asked Mrs. Elkins.
“Avalanche,” said the Ranger. “Was a chalet here—Gunsight chalet. In the winter of 1915-16 a snowslide started down Jackson, and this is what’s left.”
“Oh, heavens!” Mrs. Jones cried, looking up the red precipices of Jackson to the snow-fields far above, “do you suppose there’ll be another one?”
“We don’t often have ’em in July, marm,” said Mills briefly, “but you never can tell,” and he winked at Joe.
They now pitched tents near the lake, and Joe set about cooking a hot lunch, for he had plenty of time. While the water was heating, he got some boards from the pile of wreckage, and made a rough table and benches. Then he started out to gather some flowers. Lucy and Alice saw him, and came to help. The three of them, in ten minutes, found thirty different kinds of flowers, all in a space of two or three hundred feet, and made three bunches, which they stood in tin cans on the table, and then put little pine boughs around the cans “to camouflage them,” as Joe said.
“I told you Joe was a poet,” Lucy said to Alice. “I’ll bet he’ll produce a table-cloth in a minute.”
“Can’t do that,” Joe laughed, “unless you’ll climb up and get me one of those up there——” and he gestured toward the white snow-fields far up the cliffs, which did, indeed, look like huge sheets, or table-cloths, flung on the rocky ledges to dry.
As soon as the tents were pitched, and lunch was over, Mills said:
“Well, who wants to go up to Blackfeet Glacier?”
“I do!” from Bob.