Boy Scouts in Glacier Park
by Walter Prichard Eaton · English · Gutenberg #37485 · 455,685 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Boy Scouts in Glacier Park
Author: Walter Prichard Eaton
Illustrator: Fred H. Kiser
Release date: September 20, 2011 [eBook #37485]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37485
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOY SCOUTS IN GLACIER PARK ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
BOY SCOUTS IN GLACIER PARK
Books by
WALTER P. EATON
The Boy Scouts of Berkshire--A story
of how the Chipmunk Patrol was started,
what they did and how they did it.
_Colored frontispiece._ 313 _pages_.
Boy Scouts in the Dismal Swamp--A
story of Boy Scouting in the Dismal Swamp.
_Colored frontispiece._ 304 _pages_.
Boy Scouts in the White Mountains--A
story of a hike over the Franconia and
Presidential Ranges.
_Colored frontispiece._ 308 _pages_.
Boy Scouts of the Wildcat Patrol.--A
Story of Boy Scouting.
_Colored frontispiece._ 315 _pages_.
Peanut--Cub Reporter--A Boy Scout's
life and adventures on a newspaper.
_Colored frontispiece._ 320 _pages_.
Boy Scouts in Glacier Park. 336 _pages_.
_Cloth bound. Price_, $1.75 _net each_
[Illustration: The Great Continental Divide and the Game Trail Along
the Top]
Boy Scouts in Glacier Park
The Adventures of Two Young Easterners
in the Heart of the High Rockies
By
WALTER PRICHARD EATON
Illustrated with Photographs by
FRED H. KISER
W. A. WILDE COMPANY
BOSTON CHICAGO
Copyrighted, 1918,
BY W. A. WILDE COMPANY
All rights reserved
BOY SCOUTS IN GLACIER PARK
To
FRED H. KISER
who photographs mountains so well
because he loves them so much
Best of companions on the high trails
and around the evening camp-fire
FOREWORD
Glacier Park is one of the newest, as well as one of the most beautiful,
of our National Parks. It is peculiarly fitted to be a summer
playground, both for men and women who prefer to travel on horseback and
"rough it" by putting up at a hotel at night, and for the true mountain
lovers, who delight to use their own legs in climbing, and to sleep
under the stars. This book has been written primarily to show Young
America just how interesting, exciting, full of outdoor adventure, and
full, too, of real education, life in this National park can be. We can
promise our boy readers, and their parents, too, that there isn't any
"faking" in this story. The trips we tell about are all real trips, and
if you go to Glacier Park you can take them all--all, that is, except,
perhaps, the climb up the head wall of Iceberg Lake. You have to have a
real mountaineer as a guide, with a real Alpine rope, in order to make
that trip. It was fortunate for Tom that one came along. Then, too,
unless you stay in the Park over the winter, you haven't much chance of
riding down a mountain on a snowslide. Possibly you wouldn't want to. I
never knew anybody who took that trip intentionally! Tom and Joe and the
Ranger were unlucky enough to take it, and lucky enough to live to tell
the tale.
This book isn't written just to use the Rocky Mountains as a background
for adventures which never really could happen to ordinary boys. It is
written, on the contrary, to show what fine adventures can happen to
ordinary boys, in one of the finest and most healthful and beautiful
spots in this great country of ours, if only the boys have pluck, and
have been good Scouts enough to learn how to take care of themselves in
the open.
And it is written, too, in order to tell about Glacier Park, to make you
want to go there and see it for yourself, to make you glad and proud
that the United States has set aside for the use of all the public such
a splendid playground, and to make you, if possible, more determined
than ever to protect this, and all our other parks and State and
National forests, from the attacks of the men who are always trying to
get laws passed to let them spoil the meadows and the wildflowers with
their sheep, or cut the forests for timber, putting their selfish gain
above the welfare of the whole people.
W. P. E.
Twin Fires
Sheffield, Massachusetts
1918
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Joe Gets Bad News About His Lungs--His "Pipes," as Spider
Called Them 13
II. Joe Learns How Many Friends He Has, and Achieves a Tent
to Sleep In 21
III. Spider Finds a Way to Get to the Rocky Mountains,
to "Pump Joe's Pipes Full of Ozone" 32
IV. Tom and Joe Cross the Continent with Their Faces Glued
to the Car Window and Reach the Rocky Mountains 43
V. The Scouts Learn Why the Rocky Mountains Have No Foot-Hills
and Arrive at Many Glacier 54
VI. Tom Becomes Boss of the Tepee Camp, and the Scouts
Pitch Their Tents in the Evergreens 63
VII. Joe Gets Acquainted with Porcupines, the Diamond Hitch,
and Switchback Trails 73
VIII. Joe Gets a Chance at Last to Go out on a Trip As Camp
Cook 93
IX. Over Piegan Pass to St. Mary Lake, Underneath the
Precipices 100
X. The Ranger Tells a Grizzly Bear Story Before the
Camp-Fire 123
XI. To Gunsight Lake, and Joe Falls Into a Crevasse on
Blackfeet Glacier 129
XII. Over Gunsight to Lake McDonald, and Joe and Bob See
a Grizzly at Close Range 144
XIII. In Avalanche Basin, Where Bob Learns That the Story
of the Englishman's Walk Before Breakfast Was No Joke 168
XIV. Up the Divide in a Rain, with a Lost Horse on the
Way, and a Howling Snow-Storm at the Top 177
XV. Tom's Chance for Adventure Comes Unexpectedly, Wearing
Hobnail Shoes and Carrying a Rope 189
XVI. Tom Goes up a Two Thousand Foot Wall, with an Alpine
Rope, and Learns the Proper Way to Climb 203
XVII. Tom Sees Both Mountain Sheep and Goats Do Their Wild
Leaps Down Dizzy Ledges 218
XVIII. Joe Gets Good News from the Doctor, and the Scouts
Name Their Camp, "Camp Kent" 232
XIX. The Indian Pow-Wow--Tom and Joe Get Into the Squaw
Dance 240
XX. The Scouts Start on a Trip Together at Last, to Climb
Chief Mountain 250
XXI. The Climb up the Tower of Chief Mountain, the Indian
Relic on the Summit and an Eagle's Nest 257
XXII. A Blizzard on Flat Top--The Camp is Christened "Valley
Forge" 268
XXIII. Up to Chaney Glacier and the Discovery of a Three
Thousand Foot Precipice 276
XXIV. The Boys Prepare for Winter in the Park, and Learn
Why the Timber-Line Trees Are Only Three Feet Tall 283
XXV. Protecting the Deer Yards--the Scouts Wait in the
Moonlight and Bag a Mountain Lion 291
XXVI. A Hundred Miles in Four Days, Over the Snow, Which
Is a Long Trip to Get Your Mail 302
XXVII. The Ranger and the Boys Get a Ride Down the Mountain
on a Snow Avalanche, and Don't Look for Another 312
XXVIII. Tom Starts on a Long Hike in the Deep Snow, over the
Divide, Risking Snow-Slides, to Save the Ranger's Life 318
XXIX. Tom Tramps Down McDonald Creek in a Chinook Wind,
and Reaches Shelter Almost Exhausted 322
XXX. Tom Gets Back with the Doctor, and Mills Pulls
Through--then the Scouts Have to Leave for Home 327
XXXI. Home Again--Joe's Christmas Present to His Mother Is
Sound Health Again, and Tom Rejoices 334
CHAPTER I--Joe Gets Bad News About His Lungs--His "Pipes," as Spider
Called Them
"What's the matter, Joe, lost all your pep?" asked Tom Seymour, as he
slowed his pace down so that his tired companion could keep up with him.
It was a Saturday morning in May, and the two boys, in their scout
suits, with heavy shoes on, were tramping through the woods, where the
spring flowers were beginning to appear and the little leaf buds were
bursting out on the trees. Both Tom Seymour and his chum, Joe Clark,
loved the woods, and especially in early spring they got into them
whenever they could, to see how the birds and animals had come through
the winter, and then a little later to watch for the flowers and see the
foliage come.
But this day Joe seemed to be getting tired. They were tramping up a
hillside, through mould softened by a recent rain, that made the footing
difficult, and though Joe was trying to keep up, Tom realized that
something was the matter.
"Say, Joe, old scout, what ails you, anyhow?" he asked again.
"Oh, it's nothing," Joe answered. "I've had a cold for a month, you
know, and it's pulled me down, that's all. Ma's giving me some tonic.
I'll be all right. But I do get awful tired lately."
He stopped just then and began to cough.
"I wish you'd shake that old cold," Tom said. "I'm getting sick of
hearing you bark in school--you always tune up just as Pap Forbes is
calling on me to translate Caesar. And if you don't shake it, you'll be
no good for the team, and how's the Southmead High School going to trim
Mercerville without you on second bag?"
Joe stopped coughing as soon as he could, and demanded, "Well, you don't
think I keep the old thing around because I like it, do you? I'll give
it to anybody who'll cart it off. Come on--let's forget it!"
They started up the hill again, which grew steeper as they advanced, and
presently Tom realized once more that Joe couldn't keep up. As he had to
breathe harder with the increased steepness, too, he began to cough
again.
"Say, have you been to see a doctor?" Tom demanded.
"Oh, sure," said Joe, sitting down on a rock to rest "Ma had old Doc
Jones in first week I was sick, and he gave me some stuff--tasted like a
mixture of kerosene and skunk cabbage, too."
"Doc Jones is no good," Tom declared. "My father says he wouldn't have
him for a sick cat. He doesn't even know there are germs. Mr. Rogers
told me the Doc thought it was foolish to make us scouts boil the water
from strange brooks before we drank it. Haven't you been to anybody else
since, when you didn't get better?"
"Say, what do you think I am, a millionaire?" said Joe. "I can't be
spending money on fancy doctors, and get through high school, too. Ma's
got all she can handle now, with food and everything costing so much."
"I know all that, old scout," Tom answered, putting his hand on Joe's
shoulder. "But I guess it would cost your mother more if you were laid
up, wouldn't it? Now, I've got a hunch you need some good doc to give
you the once over. Are you tired all the time like this?"
"Oh, no," Joe replied. "Or only at night, mostly," he added. "I get kind
of hot and tired at night, and I can't do much work. That's why I've
been flunking Caesar. Old Pap thinks I'm lying down on the job, but I
really ain't. I try every evening, but the words get all mixed together
on the page."
Tom sprang to his feet with the quick, almost catlike agility which, in
combination with his thin, rather tall and very wiry frame, had earned
for him the nickname of Spider.
"You come along with me," he said.
"Depends on where you're going," Joe laughed.
"Say, I'm patrol leader, ain't I?"
"You are, but this isn't the patrol. We aren't under scout discipline
to-day."
"_You_ are," laughed Tom. "You're going to do just what I tell you. Come
on, now!"
He grabbed Joe by the wrist and brought him to his feet. Joe didn't
resist, either, though Tom expected a scrap. He came along meekly down
the hill, through the wet, fragrant woods. Once on the village street,
Spider led the way directly to Mr. Rogers' house, and 'round the house
to the studio, and knocked on the door.
The scout master opened it. He was wearing his long artist's apron, and
had his big palette, covered with all the colors of the rainbow, thrust
over the thumb of his left hand.
"Hello, Spider; hello, Joe," he said. "What's the trouble? Has the
tenderfoot patrol mutinied?"
The boys came in.
"No, sir, but Joe's windpipes have," said Tom. He quickly told about his
chum's cold, and how he got tired now all the time.
"Now, cough for the gentleman, Joe," he added with a laugh.
Joe laughed, too, which actually did set him to coughing.
But Mr. Rogers didn't laugh. He looked very grave, and began to take off
his apron. He washed his hands, put on his coat, and with a short,
"Come, boys," started down the path.
There was a famous doctor in Southmead who didn't practice in the town
at all. His patients came from various parts of the country, to be
treated for special diseases, and they lived while there in a sort of
hotel-sanitorium. It was said that this doctor, whose name was Meyer,
charged twenty dollars a visit. The boys soon realized that Mr. Rogers
was headed for his house.
"Say, who does he think I am, John D. Rockefeller?" Joe whispered to
Tom.
"Don't you worry," Tom whispered back. "He's a friend of old Doc
Meyer's, all right. He'll fix it. You trot along."
They had to wait in the doctor's anteroom some time, as he had a patient
in the office. Finally he came out and greeted Mr. Rogers warmly. He was
not a native of Southmead, but had come there only two or three years
ago from New York, to have his sanitorium in the country, and he had
always been so busy that most of the townspeople scarcely knew him. Tom
and Joe, while they had seen him, had never spoken with him before. He
was a middle-aged Jew, with gold spectacles on his big nose, and large,
kindly brown eyes, which grew very keen as he looked at the boys, and
seemed to pierce right through them.
The scout master spoke to him a moment, in a low voice, and then he led
all three into his office. It wasn't like any doctor's office the scouts
had ever been in. It looked more like some sort of a mysterious
laboratory, except for the flat-top office desk in the middle, and the
strange chair, with wheels and joints, which could evidently be tipped
at any angle, or made into a flat surface like an elevated sofa. There
was a great X-ray machine, and many other strange devices, and rows of
test tubes on a white enameled table, and sinks and sterilizers.
The doctor patted Joe on the head as if he'd been a little boy instead
of a first class scout sixteen years old, going on seventeen, and large
for his age. He sat Joe down in a chair and asked him a lot of questions
first, making some notes on a card which he took out of a small filing
cabinet that was like a library catalogue case. Then he told him to
undress.
Joe stripped to the waist, and stood up while the doctor tapped his
shoulders, his chest, his back, and then listened with his ear down both
on his chest and back, and finally he took a stethoscope and went over
every square inch of surface, front and back, covering his lungs, while
he made the patient cough, say "Ah," draw in a deep breath, and expel it
slowly. Finally he took his temperature, and a sample of sputum.
Meanwhile Tom looked on with a rapidly increasing alarm. He knew a
little something about tuberculosis, and realized it was for that he was
examining his chum. He knew what a deadly disease it is, too, if it is
not caught in time, and he began to feel sick in the pit of his stomach.
He wanted to cry out to the doctor and demand that he tell him at once
that old Joe did not have this terrible disease--that he was all right,
that it was nothing but a cold. But, of course, he said not a word.
The doctor was putting Joe on the scales now, and weighing him.
"A hundred and fifteen," he said. "How's that? About your regular
weight?"
"Guess there's something wrong with your scales," Joe answered, looking
at the marker. "I ought to be a hundred and thirty. 'Course, I had more
clothes on in the winter, last time I was weighed."
"Yes, and you ought to have grown some since," said the doctor. "Well,
you will yet. You go home and rest now--sit in the sun this afternoon,
and go to bed early, with your window open. Come back here to-morrow
morning at ten o'clock, and I'll know more about you."
"But I can't sit in the sun to-day," Joe cried. "Why, we've got a game
this after', and I _got_ to play second."
The doctor looked at him with his kindly, fatherly smile, but his voice
was like a general's giving a command. "No more baseball for you for the
present, my boy," he said. "You've got to keep quiet and rest, if you
want to get well quickly."
"How soon can he play?" Tom put in, excitedly. After he had said it, he
thought it sounded as if he were more interested in the team than in
Joe, and he was going to explain, but the doctor replied before he had a
chance.
"That will all depend on how quiet you make him keep," said he. "You can
come back with him to-morrow if you want, and I'll tell you some more."
The doctor spoke softly to Mr. Rogers while Joe was dressing, and then
the three went out.
"Say, he doesn't leave much of you unexplored, does he?" said Joe.
"What's the damage, Mr. Rogers? Gee, I never thought I'd be swell enough
to go to Doc Meyer!"
"I guess he doesn't charge for scouts, when they really need him," Mr.
Rogers answered. "Now, Joe, you go home and do what he told you. I'll be
over to see your mother later, and tell her to keep an eye on you."
Tom went with the scout master in the opposite direction, his face very
grave.
"Is--is--has old Joey got consumption?" he managed to ask, his lips dry
and a lump coming up in his chest.
The scout master looked at his young patrol leader, and then put a hand
over his shoulder.
"The doctor won't say for certain till he's examined the sputum," Mr.
Rogers replied, "but I'm afraid he's got the beginnings of it. Now,
don't take it hard, and don't say a word to Joe or his mother or anybody
else. He's young, and it's just beginning, and we'll pull him through in
good shape, and make a well man of him again. But you must make him do
just what the doctor says, and stand by him."
"Stand by him!" cried Tom, two tears coming into his eyes in spite of
himself. "Say, he's my best friend, isn't he? What do you take me for?"
"I take you for a good scout," said Mr. Rogers.
CHAPTER II--Joe Learns How Many Friends He Has, and Achieves
a Tent to Sleep In
Tom could hardly sleep that night, for thinking about his friend. The
doctor would probably tell him he'd got to go to the Adirondacks to
live, or maybe to Colorado or New Mexico; Tom knew that people with bad
lungs were sent to those places. But how was Joe going to get there, and
how was he going to live when he got there? Joe's mother was a widow,
with two other, younger children, and it was hard enough for her to send
Joe through high school, in spite of what he earned in summer driving a
mowing machine on the golf links. If he had consumption, the doctor
wouldn't let him work--he would make him keep quiet. How was it going to
be managed? Tom kept turning over this problem in his head, till he
finally fell asleep for very weariness.
The next day he and Mr. Rogers again went with Joe to Dr. Meyer's. On
the road Tom was silent and serious.
"Say, what's the matter with you, Spider? You look as if you were going
to my funeral," said Joe.
"Yes, what's the matter with you?" Mr. Rogers added, giving him a sharp
look which Joe didn't see. "Scouts are supposed to be cheerful, aren't
they?"
"Yes, sir," Tom answered, trying to grin. But he made rather a poor job
of it, he was so worried and anxious.
Dr. Meyer sat them all down in his office.
"Well," he said, turning to Joe, "how do you feel this morning? Did you
keep still as I told you to?"
"You bet he did!" Tom put in.
"We'll see, we'll see," the doctor smiled, putting a thermometer into
Joe's mouth, and picking up his left wrist to feel his pulse.
"Now, that's better than yesterday," he added, after examining the
thermometer. "You see what resting does. I guess you'll have to do some
more of it."
"You mean I can't play second next week, either?" Joe cried.
"I mean you can't play second for a long time," said the doctor,
gravely.
"Is--is there something the matter with me?" Joe cried, growing a little
pale.
"There isn't much yet, but there will be, if you don't do what I tell
you," the doctor answered. "You have a case of incipient tuberculosis,
that hasn't developed enough yet so we can't cure it, and make you weigh
a hundred and eighty pounds by the time you are twenty, or even
nineteen. You ought to be a big man, you know. But it will all depend on
you."
Tom was leaning half out of his chair to listen.
"What must he do, doctor?" he asked, unable to keep silent.
"Are you going to make him do it?" the doctor smiled.
"I am, or--or bust his old head," Tom replied, with such heartfelt
affection that both the men laughed.
"Do you sleep with your windows wide open at night?" the doctor asked
Joe.
"Why--I--I can't in winter, 'cause ma won't let me; it makes the room
too cold for the kid, she says."
"What!" Dr. Meyer exclaimed. "Do you sleep with a small brother?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, the first thing you do is to stop that! You must sleep in a room
by yourself. It's not safe for your brother. You must sleep with the
windows wide open."
"Couldn't he have my tent, and sleep outdoors?" Tom put in.
"Better still," the doctor replied. "Now, I'm going to make up a list of
what you are to eat and drink, and a schedule of how you are to rest,
and how much you can walk around."
"Walk around?" Joe said, bewildered. "I _have_ to walk to school, and
back."
"No you don't. No more school for you this term," the doctor answered.
Joe's jaw dropped. "Why--I--I--I'll not get promoted into the senior
class, then!" he gasped. "Oh, please, I _must_ go to school!"
"Good gracious, here's a boy that _wants_ to go to school!" laughed Dr.
Meyer. "It does you credit, my son, but it can't be."
"But it's been so hard for mother----"
"It would be harder for her if you couldn't go to school at all--ever,
wouldn't it?" said the doctor, leaning forward and laying a kindly hand
on Joe's knee.
"Yes--yes, sir," said Joe, who was now pretty white and scared.
"Dr. Meyer," Tom put in, "oughtn't Joe to go away somewhere to the
mountains--the Adirondacks, or Colorado, or--or some place?"
"Well, he'd undoubtedly mend quicker in the Rockies, if he could be
looked after," the doctor replied. "I wouldn't say it's absolutely
necessary in his case, but if he knows somebody out there to look after
him, and can afford it----"
"'Course I can't afford it, Spider," Joe put in. "Quit pipe dreamin'."
"I'm not pipe dreaming," Tom replied. "If you'll get well quicker in the
Rockies, you're going to the Rockies, and I'm going along to take care
of you."
"How are you going to manage it, Tom?" said Mr. Rogers.
"I--I dunno, but I'm _going_ to, somehow. Old Joe's got to get well and
finish high school, and room with me in college, and then we're going to
be civil engineers or foresters, and----"
"But the first thing is to get well," the doctor interrupted. "You can
plan for the Rockies later. Right now we must see about Joe's diet and
daily schedule."
After he had drawn these up--and it seemed to Joe he'd got to live on
raw eggs and milk and cod liver oil, and spend most of his life in a
chair on the porch--the two boys and the scout master departed.
It was now Joe who was depressed and glum, and Tom who needed no
prompting to be cheerful. The minute he saw his chum in the dumps, he
set about restoring his spirits.
"Buck up, old scout," he cried. "The doc told you it would be all right.
Gee, what's just sitting on the porch for a few weeks? You won't have to
translate any old Caesar, and I'll come every day to see you swallowing
cod liver oil, and then as soon as I can get it doped out, we'll hit the
trail for the Rocky Mountains. Don't you want to see the Rocky
Mountains?"
"Oh, quit your kidding," poor Joe answered. "The only way I'll ever see
the Rocky Mountains is in the movies."
"Don't you fool yourself. Mr. Rogers and I'll dope out something yet,
won't we, Mr. Rogers?"
"We'll put our heads together hard, anyhow," the scout master answered.
"But first, Tom, we must get the scouts together and find a way in which
we can all help Joe's mother, now Joe can't haul wood and do heavy
work."
"That's easy, sir. And we must teach all the scouts to stop sleeping
with their windows shut, too, mustn't we?"
"Alas!" said Mr. Rogers. "I thought I had. I guess we've got to teach
the mothers and fathers to let them open the windows. And that's not
easy, Tom."
"I s'pose not. Funny how afraid some folks are of fresh air. Well, old
Joe's going to get plenty. I'm going to set up my tent in his yard this
afternoon."
"Not your new tent, Spider, it might spoil it," said Joe.
"Spoil your grandmother," Tom retorted. "I guess it's my tent and I can
do what I please with it, can't I? You go home and drink a tumbler of
cod liver oil."
"I'm going with him, and have a talk with his mother," said Mr. Rogers.
"You can bring the tent after dinner, and if you need a cot bed for it,
stop at my house and get my folding camp cot. That'll be my
contribution."
"Sure, we'll fix him up so he'll never want to move into the house
again," cried Tom, hurrying off toward his house.
His tent, a Christmas present from his father and mother, was Tom's
proudest possession. It was made of balloon silk, very thin and light,
but water-proof. It could "sleep" two occupants comfortably, and had
mosquito netting screens for the flaps, and a little screen curtain for
the rear window. It could be erected either on poles or on a rope strung
between two trees. Yet the whole tent could be rolled up into a bundle
which you could tuck under your arm, and it weighed but fifteen pounds.
It cost a considerable sum of money, for Tom's parents, while not rich,
wanted to make Tom a good present that last Christmas as a reward for
his improvement in his school work. We might as well tell the truth
about it, for a story that doesn't tell the truth is sure to get found
out. Tom, in his sophomore year in the high school, had been a pretty
poor student. He was "bright enough," as his teachers said, but he would
not study. He had got interested in so many things that seemed more
worth while to him than books--trapping, building a cabin in the woods,
football and baseball, and especially the scouts. But after his
sophomore year was over, and the summer vacation, too, was nearly done,
Mr. Rogers called him into the studio one day and had a long talk with
him. The result of that talk was that he came out pretty well ashamed of
himself. Here he was a patrol leader in the scouts, Mr. Rogers pointed
out, and right end on the high school team, with the prospect of being
captain his senior year--in other words, one of the leaders among the
boys. It was up to him, then, to set the rest a good example. Besides,
he wanted to go to college, did he not, or to a forestry school? Did he
not know that there were examinations to be passed? And what good was a
surveyor or an engineer or a forester who did not know his business? Did
Tom think you could know your business without studying? And that did
not mean beginning to study some time in the future--it meant beginning
now! Mr. Rogers ended up by telling him he was a bad scout, a bit of a
slacker, which got to him more than anything else that was said.
He went out of the studio very sober, and he began to work that fall
term as he had never worked in school before. Of course, he soon found
out that if he got his lessons every day, it was really very much easier
to keep along than it had been when he used to let them slide for two or
three days at a time, and then try to catch up. In fact, it was really
no trouble at all, and from almost the tail end of the class, he
suddenly moved up to number four. His father and mother were so
delighted that they gave him the balloon silk tent for Christmas.
As soon as dinner was over, he got this tent out of his closet, wrapped
in its canvas bag, took his scout axe and some sticks from the wood-shed
to make pegs with, and started for Joe's house. On the way he stopped
for Mr. Rogers' folding cot bed. He found Joe sitting on the back porch,
in the sun, and he made him stay there, though poor Joe wanted to come
down and help set the tent up.
There were two trees in the back yard, and between them Tom strung a
double strand of clothesline, through the rings on the top of the tent.
Then he carefully raked the ground below, and with a shovel filled in a
little hollow so that the rain water would drain away and not come in
under. Then he stretched the tent, cut his pieces of wood into pegs, and
pegged it down. After that, he unfolded and set up the cot bed, and with
the help of Joe's mother made up the bed with blankets, put an old rug
on the ground beside it, brought out an old chair, a small table, a
candlestick and candle, and a washbowl and pitcher.
"There!" he cried. "That's good enough for anybody. Now, old Cod Liver,
you can sleep outdoors, rain or shine."
Joe insisted on coming down to see his "new room," and while they were
inspecting it three of the Moose Patrol came into the yard. They had
heard the news about Joe--"by wireless, I guess," Tom said, for he had
not told anybody except his own father and mother--and had come to see
what they could do to help.
"Say, that's some swell bedroom, Joe," said Bob Sawtelle. "Wish I had
one like it. Ma wouldn't always be callin' me down for spillin' water on
the wall paper."
"What do you mean, spillin' water on the wall paper?" Joe demanded.
"What do you do, throw it around the room?"
"Aw, no, but a feller splashes around washin' his face, and dumpin' the
bowl into the slop basin, don't he?"
"I guess you do," Tom laughed. "Do you fellows really want to help old
Joey?"
"That's what we're here for," said all three.
"All right, we'll get the kindlings split for the next week, and the
coal brought up for Mrs. Clark. Where's the axe, Joe?"
Joe showed them, and the four boys went at the wood-pile and the coal
bin. They split enough kindlings to last at least a week, filled up the
wood-box by the kitchen stove and piled more wood behind it and carried
up three hods of coal besides a big basket full.
"You're awful good to do this for Joe and me," said Mrs. Clark.
"Oh, that's what scouts are for," Tom declared. "Some of us are going to
come around every day and 'tend to things, so old Joey can mind the
doctor, aren't we, fellows?"
"Sure thing."
"Ra-_ther_."
"You bet."
"Say, Spider," Walter Howard suggested, "you ought to call a scout
meeting and get everybody in on this--divide it up so one scout comes
every day for a week on his way home from school. Why, old Joe'll be
well again before we've all had a turn!"
"That's what I'm going to do, Walt, Tuesday night. Pass the word along."
"I know what my old man's goin' to say," Bob remarked.
"Well, what's he goin' to say? Spring it."
"He's goin' to say, 'If you boys were asked to split kindlings for your
own mothers every day, you'd put up an awful holler.'"
"Oh, sure, mine too," laughed Walt. "They always say that. Seems as if
they thought we were splitting kindlings because we liked to split
kindlings, instead of because we like old Joey."
"That's the dope," said Tom. "Funny how folks don't see things
sometimes."
"Ain't it?" said Bob. "Well, so long, Joe, old scout. Hope you sleep
well in the tent."
"So long, Bob."
"So long"--from the others.
"So long, fellows--much obliged."
Only Tom was left.
"It's pretty nice to have so many friends," said Joe, "even if you have
to get sick to find it out."
"Now you've found out, you get well again," Spider laughed. "I'll stop
on my way to school in the morning and see you, and find out what books
you want brought home. So long, old top."
"So long, Spider."
Tom went out of the gate, or, rather, over it, vaulting it with one
hand. Joe's mother came out on the porch and put one arm around the
boy's neck, and with the other hand felt his forehead.
"I don't think you've got so much fever to-night," she said.
"It's 'cause the fellers have cut all the wood and hauled the coal, that
used to make me so tired. Gee, they're good scouts, aren't they,
ma--'specially old Spider."
"Yes, Joe," said she, "there are a lot of good people in the world."
"You bet," said Joe.
CHAPTER III--Spider Finds a Way to Get to the Rocky Mountains,
to "Pump Joe's Pipes Full of Ozone"
There are no doubt a lot of good people in the world, as Mrs. Clark
said, but there is no doubt that a great many of them are forgetful. Tom
Seymour found this out in the next few weeks. The scouts meant well, but
every two or three days the one whose turn it was to look after the
Clark wood and coal and do whatever heavy work there was to be
done,--work too heavy for Joe's little brother and sister--would forget
the duty. Tom, however, never forgot, for he went there every day, to
study his lessons with Joe so Joe could keep up in his school work, and
when the kindlings had not been split or the coal brought up, he did it.
"I don't know what I should do without you, Tom," said Mrs. Clark. "I
feel guilty, too, because I feel as if you ought to be at home doing it
for your own mother."
Tom laughed. "It's a funny thing," he said, "but having this on my mind
has stopped my forgetting at home. I used to forget all the time, but
now, when I go home, ma's wood-box is the first thing I think of. I kind
of got the habit, I guess!"
Meanwhile Tom was turning over and over in his mind plans for getting
Joe out into the high, dry air of the Rocky Mountains as soon as school
was over. The first thing to think about was how to raise the money to
get there. In his own case, it would be easy, because he had over a
hundred dollars in the savings bank, which he had earned in the past
five years, or which had been given to him at Christmas, and which he
had saved up. But Joe had never been able to save his earnings--he had
needed them all for his clothes and to help his mother out. It was Bob
Sawtelle who solved that problem.
"Let's us scouts give a dance and a strawberry festival for old Joey,"
he said. "We can all of us pick some strawberries, enough for the feed,
an' get our mothers to make cake, an' Bill Andrus's father'll give us
the cream from his dairy, an' the girls'll help us serve, an'
everybody'll come when they know it's for old Joey, an' there'll be two
hundred people there, an' we'll soak 'em fifty cents, and that'll clear
'most a hundred bones, an'----"
"And you'd better take in some breath," laughed Tom, "while I tell you
that's a fine idea. It's as good as settled now."
Tom was so sure of the success of the strawberry festival, in fact, that
he began at once to consider what they were going to do when they got
out West. Here he had to have Mr. Rogers' help. The scout master wrote
some letters, and a week later called Tom into the studio.
"I think I've got it," he said, "that is, if you are willing to work,
and don't care what you do."
"That's me, when it's for old Joey," Spider declared.
"Well, here's the proposition. Ever hear of Glacier National Park?"
"I've seen some pictures of it in a magazine," said Tom. "Looked good to
me, too!"
"I guess it's a pretty fine place, though I was never there. It is up in
the northwestern part of Montana, on the Great Northern Railroad, and
there are two big hotels in the Park, right under the mountains, and
some smaller hotels they call chalets, because they are built like Swiss
chalets. A friend of mine who is connected with the railroad tells me
these hotels, which open late in June, always need bell-boys. They are
so far from any cities, or even any towns of any sort, that it's hard to
get labor out there. Now, I guess you could get a job as bellhop all
right, though I don't know whether Joe's strong enough to work yet. We'd
have to ask the doctor first. If he isn't, my plan would be for you to
take your tent along, and two folding cot beds, and get permission to
pitch it out in the woods near the hotel. You wouldn't have any other
use for your money out there, so you could probably support Joe all
right, and he could do the cooking. He's a good cook, isn't he?"
"Sure--the best in the patrol. He's got a merit badge for cooking, you
know."
"Of course, they might object to having a tuberculous person in the
hotel, but if he kept out in the woods, there wouldn't be any trouble,
my friend says. Besides, Joe isn't a bad case. He's plainly getting
better all the time. I think we can fix it, if you are willing to take
the job, and look after him. Being a bellhop isn't just the job I'd pick
out for you, or any boy, if I had the choosing. You have to be a bit of
a bootlick, and people will give you tips, which is against all scout
rules."
"But the tips won't be for me, they'll be for old Joey," said Tom.
"Exactly. And they will be given to you for work you do. They will
really be your pay, for you won't get much other pay. It all depends on
how you take them. If you serve people who don't give you tips as well
and as cheerfully as you serve the others, it will be all right. We've
got to get Joe well, and we can't pick and choose. So I'll put it up to
you. I guess I can trust you not to become a tip hog. And if you find
any better way to earn Joe's keep out there, where you won't have to
take tips to get your living, you take it, won't you?"
"You bet I will!" cried Tom. "Maybe I can become a--a cowboy, or
something."
Mr. Rogers smiled. "You'll have to learn to ride a horse first."
"Oh, I can ride a horse."
"You may think you can, but after you've seen a real cowboy ride, you'll
know you're only in the kindergarten class," the scout master laughed.
Now that it seemed reasonably sure that he could get Joe to the Rockies,
and find a way to live after they got there, Tom went at the task of
arranging the strawberry festival. Of course, he made Bob Sawtelle
chairman of the "festival committee," because it was Bob's idea to start
with. All the scouts whose fathers or mothers had strawberry beds were
"rounded up," and a list made of how many baskets could be expected.
Little Tim Sawyer, who was clever with a pencil or brush, made several
posters to hang in the post-office and the stores. Spider himself wrote
some notices for the weekly paper. Mr. Martin, who owned Martin's block,
where the festival was to be held, promised them the hall rent free, and
as the cream was promised to them, also, and the cakes were made by the
mothers, about all they had to buy was the sugar.
"Oh, we're forgetting the drinks!" Bob suddenly cried, "and the music!
We can't have a dance without music."
Some of the high school girls, Joe's classmates, promised to furnish the
fruit punch, and serve it, too, so that was easily settled. The music--a
pianist and two violins--the boys hired from a near-by town, at a cost
of fifteen dollars. With the sugar and a few other little expenses,
their total outlay was about twenty dollars. The affair was so well
advertised, however, and all the scouts went around selling tickets for
so many days in advance, that when the evening came (it was a fine
night, too, in June), there were two hundred and fifty people in the
hall, and the scouts who took tickets at the door were kept busy till
their fingers ached. The strawberries were all used up, and Bob and Tom
had to rush out to the drug store to buy ice-cream for some of the late
comers. That cut into part of their profits, but of course they could
not refuse to give something to eat to the people who had paid for it.
When the hard work of serving all these people was over, and the dancing
had begun, Bob and Tom took all the money into a back room, and counted
it up. With the musicians and the sugar paid for, and the ice-cream from
the druggist's, there was left a little over ninety dollars clear
profit.
"Hooray!" cried Tom, "that'll get old Joey to Glacier Park easy! Now, if
I could only hear from my application for a job, we'd start next Monday.
School is over. Gosh, there's no sense hanging 'round here."
"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."
"A year!" Joe exclaimed. "We're only going for the summer."
"Well, the summer will help," said the doctor. "Keep on eating your milk
and eggs, if you can get 'em, but probably after you've been in the
woods a while you won't worry much about your food--you'll gobble what
you can get, and so long as you feel right, go ahead. I'll give your
friend a clinical thermometer to take your temperature, and you must get
weighed once in so often. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have a doctor
look you over now and then, too, if one comes into the Park. The things
you must look out for are over-exertion and exposure. I wouldn't do
anything but light work for a month yet, at least, and no climbing or
long walks. If you must go somewhere, go on horseback, at a slow pace.
And keep warm and dry."
"Well, Joe, that's a fine, encouraging report!" the scout master
declared as they left. "You keep on minding the doc, and you'll be a
well man."
"He'll keep on minding him, all right, all right," said Tom, putting his
arm around Joe's shoulder, and then tightening it around his neck till
Joe's head was forced over where he could give it a friendly punch.
Joe started to duck and punch back, but Spider cried, "Here--cut that
out! No over-exertion!"--and then the three laughed and hurried on, to
make arrangements for the departure of the boys.
Clothing, of course, was the most important thing, and the boys got out
their trunks and selected what they would need, with the aid of a folder
describing conditions in the Park. They took their scout suits, of
course, with leggins, and their heaviest high boots. Tom also added a
box of steel spikes and a key to screw them in with. They also took
their sweaters, and mackinaws, though it seemed foolish to be taking
mackinaws for a summer trip. Then they packed two suits of winter
underwear, several pairs of heavy wool socks for tramping, two flannel
outing shirts, and rubber ponchos, which both boys had bought the year
before when the scouts took a five day hike. Then, of course, they took
their knapsacks, and both boys sent for dunnage bags of stout canvas.
They took their scout axes and cooking kits, knives, Tom's camera,
compasses, and notebooks to keep diaries in. Tom had a folding camp
lantern for which they got a box of candles. For bedding, each packed
two pairs of heavy double blankets, and Joe's mother insisted on making
a separate bundle of a winter bed puff, which, as it turned out later,
he was glad enough to have. They also put in their winter pajamas, their
scout hats, and some old leather gloves. Finally, they got some packages
of dehydrated vegetables, soup sticks, powdered egg, army rations, and
tabloid tea, to use on walking trips if Joe got strong enough to tramp.
Such condensed and light weight rations, Mr. Rogers thought, probably
could not be purchased in the Park.
It was a lovely day, almost at the end of June, when the two boys
finally started. There had been a scout meeting the night before, at
which Bob Sawtelle, who was to act as patrol leader in Spider's absence,
had made a speech for the rest and presented Joe with a pocket camera,
the gift of the entire troop. It was a short speech, but to the point.
"Old Joey's pipes have gone on the blink," he said, "and he's got to
beat it out West to pump 'em full of ozone. We other fellers thought
we'd like to see what he's seen, when he gets back, so we all chipped in
and got a camera. Here it is, Joe, and don't try to snap Spider with it,
or you'll bust the lens."
Joe tried to make a speech in reply, but he couldn't do it. He just took
the camera, and said, "Gee, fellows, you're--you're all to the good."
"And don't you worry about your mother's coal, either," Bob added.
"We're going to keep right on fillin' the hods, and if anybody forgets
when it's his turn, I'm goin' to beat him on the bean."
"That's a good one," cried little Sam Cowan. "You forgot yourself
yesterday!"
"Well, I ain't goin' to forget any more, or let you, either," Bob
answered.
Bob and several more scouts, as well as Mr. Rogers, Joe's mother and
little brother and sister, and Tom's family, were all down at the depot
to see the boys off in the morning. There were kisses and some tears
from the women, and a scout cheer from the boys, and cries of "Have you
got your axe, Spider?" and "Joe, dear, are you sure you put in your comb
and brush?" and "Tom, dear, now don't forget to send mother a postcard
just as soon as you get there," and "Say, Joey, bring home a Rocky
Mountain sheep's head for the clubroom," and "Hi, Spider, don't forget a
grizzly bear rug for me, so my little tootsies won't be cold when I hop
out of bed."
The train came, the boys got aboard, it pulled out, and looking back
they saw their friends and parents on the platform, waving good-bye, and
the church spires and housetops of their village vanishing into the June
green of the tree tops.
"Well," said Tom, "we're off for the Rocky Mountains!"
Joe rubbed his eyes. "Sure we are!" he answered. "I kind of hate to
leave ma, though, and the kids."
Tom slapped him on the shoulder.
"Sure you do," he said. "But it's so you can come back a husky, well
man, to look out for 'em better than ever. Don't you forget that, old
scout!"
CHAPTER IV--Tom and Joe Cross the Continent With Their Faces Glued
to the Car Window and Reach the Rocky Mountains
Neither Tom nor Joe had ever been West before, even as far as Chicago.
As soon as they had changed cars to the through train, not far from
their home town, each armed with a ticket about a yard and a half long,
and got settled in their seats in the sleeping car, they glued
themselves to the windows, and watched the country. There was something
new to see every minute--the Berkshire Hills, the Hudson River at
Albany, the great factories at Schenectady, the Mohawk River and the
Erie Canal, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo. They slept soundly that
night, and woke up as they were passing along the southern shore of Lake
Michigan. In Chicago they had to change cars again, to another station,
and they had time, after seeing that their baggage was transferred, to
walk around a little, among the high buildings, and out to the lake
front.
"It's an awful dirty place, strikes me," said Joe. "All the buildings
look as if somebody had spilled soot over 'em."
"I guess somebody has," Tom answered. "I guess they burn soft coal here.
The air's full of it. Wait till we get to the Rockies, though; there's
the air!"
The trip from Chicago to St. Paul was even more interesting than the
first stage, because after a while the train followed the bank of the
Mississippi River (the scouts had a railroad folder with a map spread
out in their seat, to see where they were every minute), and there was
something thrilling to both of them about the first sight of the great
river, which they had heard about all their lives.
"Say, it's yellow, all right," Joe exclaimed. "I'd rather go swimming in
our old hole back home, I guess. It ain't so awful big, either."
"Not way up here. We're a thousand miles from the mouth. But you'd
better not try to jump it, even here--not till you get well," Tom
laughed.
At St. Paul they changed once more, for the final train, the
trans-continental limited which would take them right through to the
Park.
"Golly, we won't see any of Minnesota," Tom complained. "It'll be dark
while we go through that. And look at all those lakes we pass." He
pointed to the map.
"Well, there has to be night as well as day out here, just like home. I
guess we can't do anything about it," said Joe. "I'm kind o' glad to
sleep, at that."
"Poor old Joe, I forget you get tired," Tom cried, penitently. "Seems to
me I _never_ want to go to sleep, with so much to see!"
"Oh, I'm not tired any more,--just sleepy," Joe said, bravely. But Tom
saw he was tired, and called the porter to make up the berths.
They woke up in the prairie country of North Dakota--or, rather, Spider
did. He was sleeping in the upper berth, of course, so Joe could have
all the air possible, and he climbed down as quietly as he could and
went into the observation car to see where they were. It was bright
sunlight, almost as it would be at home at eight o'clock, yet his watch
told him it was only a little after four. He looked out of the window on
a strange land--on the prairies about which he had read all his life and
never seen before. He had been disappointed in the Mississippi River,
but there was no disappointment here. They were more wonderful than he
had ever dreamed--just one endless green sea of growing wheat stretching
to the horizon, without a hill or a valley, as flat as the floor of the
ocean. Indeed, they looked like a green ocean, with the small houses,
the big red barns and silos, the little groves of trees behind the barns
for a windbreak, rising like islands every mile or so. The whole world
here seemed to be grain. Everything was under cultivation, there were no
trees at all except the groves planted beside the farmhouses, mile after
mile as far as the eye could see to the far horizon rolled the sea of
young wheat, or else the golden stubble where the winter crop had been
harvested.
For the first time, Tom understood what men mean when they speak of "the
great wheat fields of the West," for the first time he realized the
bigness of America. He wanted to go wake Joe at once, and if Joe hadn't
been sick, he certainly would have done so. As it was, he let him sleep
till six, and then he couldn't stand it any longer, and shook him awake.
"Joe! we're on the prairie!" he cried.
All that day, mile after mile, they traveled through the wheat, with
never a break in the vast monotony of the level land, the endless
procession of houses and barns far off, like islands in the green sea.
The sun did not set till late, and even at nine o'clock they could read
on the back platform of the observation car, as the prairie turned
dusky, and in the west the lingering sunset was like a sunset over the
sea.
"My, it's been a wonderful day!" Joe sighed, as they went to bed. "I
feel as if I'd just been soaked in _bigness_. I guess the Rockies aren't
any bigger than these prairies. But what gets me, though, is how the
kids here go sliding in winter."
A man on the platform beside them laughed.
"Say, I never saw a toboggan till I went East after I was twenty-one
years old," he said. "But I've seen some drifts that were twenty feet
high, and that's quite a hill for us."
The next morning Tom again was the first awake, and he hurried out to
see the prairie once more--but there was no prairie. The world looked
exactly as if there had come a great wind or earthquake in the night and
kicked the calm prairie sea up into waves. There were still no trees,
only a great expanse of grayish grass and wild flowers, but you couldn't
see far from the train in any direction, because the land was so cut up
with the billows, little rounded hills and earth waves maybe fifty feet
high. This was the cattle country now, and every little while a rough
log cabin and log stables, half dug out of the side of a bank, would
appear beside the track, and there would be cattle and horses grazing
over the slopes. Again Spider waked Joe, and they watched for a cowboy,
but none appeared.
As they were eating an early breakfast, the train seemed to be running
into more level prairie country again, though it never settled back into
the really flat prairies. Presently they stopped at a little town, with
a single street of low wooden and brick stores and houses, and no trees,
and the two scouts got out to stretch their legs. The first thing they
saw as they alighted was a cowboy! Clad in a flannel shirt, with big
black fur chaps down his legs and a wide-brimmed felt hat mysteriously
sticking on his head, he came dashing up about a mile a minute, kicking
up a tremendous dust, and pulling his horse down with a quick sweep that
stopped him exactly against the platform. The boys were so interested in
him that it was not till they were getting aboard again, at the
conductor's shout, that Joe looked to the west, and cried, "Spider,
quick! Look there!"
Tom followed his finger, and, lo! there they were, the Rocky Mountains!
As far to the north, as far to the south, as the eye could see stretched
the great, blue procession of towering peaks, dazzling white with great
patches of snow on summits and shoulders, and seemingly only a few miles
away.
"And we could have seen 'em _hours_ ago, if we'd only been looking
ahead," Joe complained, as they took their seats on the observation
platform. "They can't be more'n ten miles off now."
A big, heavy man who was sitting there laughed loudly.
"Guess you ain't never been out here before, have you?" he asked.
"No, we never have."
"Well, this train's making thirty miles an hour, and we got three hours
to go yet before we get to them hills," he went on. "You chaps remind me
of a story, about a friend o' mine who was prospectin' up here before
the government made a park out o' Glacier. An Englishman came along one
day, and he started out to walk to the base o' one o' them mountains
before breakfast, so my friend, bein' just naturally curious, allowed
he'd go along too. Fust, though, he sneaked out and got a bite o' grub.
Well, they walked and walked till along about ten o'clock, and the
mountain not gettin' any nearer. By'mby they come to a brook a baby
could have jumped, and the Englishman started to peel off his clothes.
"'What in blazes be you goin' to do?' asked my friend.
"'Well,' said the bally Britisher, 'that _looks_ like a brook, but I
ain't taking no chances.'"
Tom and Joe laughed.
"I've always heard you could see awfully plain out here," said Tom. "It
must bother you at first sighting a gun."
"I reckon it does bother a stranger. I seen fellers sight for a goat at
four hundred yards, when he was a clean eight hundred, and kick up the
dust on the rocks twenty feet below him."
"Have you hunted goats?" the boys demanded.
"What I've not hunted, _ain't_," said the man. "I don't know what folks
want goats for, though. They're the hardest work to get, and no good
when you get 'em. A bighorn, now!"
"What's a bighorn?" asked Joe.
The man looked at him in profound surprise. "By glory, don't you know
what a bighorn is?" he demanded. "Where do you come from, anyhow? A
bighorn's a Rocky Mountain sheep, the old ram of the flock, with horns
fifty inches long that curl around in a circle, and he's the handsomest,
finest, proudest lookin' critter God Almighty ever made. Wait till you
see one!"
"Do you think we can see one in the Park this summer?" the boys asked.
"If you climb up a cliff about seven thousand feet and make a noise like
a bunch o' grass, I reckon maybe you can," said the stranger.
The next three hours were about the longest the boys had ever spent.
They went back into the sleeper as soon as the berths were moved out of
the way and they could sit at the window, and with their faces glued to
the pane strained their eyes ahead to see the mountains. Whenever the
road made a curve, they could see them plainly, a vast, sawtooth range
of blue peaks, some of them sharp like pyramids, some of them rounded
into domes, marching down out of the north and stretching away to the
south as far as the eye could see. Not only were they bigger mountains
than the scouts had ever seen, even on a trip the year before to the
White Mountains in New Hampshire, but all over them, on their summits,
in great patches on their sides, sometimes quite covering an entire
peak, were great fields of snow. Here it was about the 4th of July, with
flowers blooming in the grass beside the track and a blazing hot sun in
the heavens--and the mountains just out there covered with vast fields
of snow!
"Gee, I wish the old engineer'd put on some steam!" sighed Joe.
"I wish he would," Tom answered. "But I guess that snow ain't all going
to melt before we get there. Say, Joe, why do you suppose that range
goes right up out of the prairie without any foot-hills? Remember, when
we went to the White Mountains we got into smaller mountains long before
we reached Washington? They went up like steps. But here the Rockies
just jump right up out of the plain."
"I don't know--wish I'd studied geology. Maybe the guy who had the
friend who walked with the Englishman can tell us."
Tom shook his head. "I have a hunch he knows more about goats than
geology," said he. "Maybe we can get a book at the Park."
The mountains were now getting perceptibly nearer. They were becoming
less blue, the snow showed more plainly on their sharp peaks and great
shoulders, and the boys began to pack up their handbags and get ready to
disembark.
Their rear-platform friend, coming through the car, stopped and laughed.
"Don't go trying to jump no brooks, now," he said.
"Sure--we'll throw a stone first," Spider answered. "Can you tell us why
the Rocky Mountains haven't any foot-hills?"
The stranger seemed to take this very seriously. "They did have once,"
said he, "but they was all dug away for the gold and copper."
Then he passed on, still laughing.
"He's a good scout," laughed Joe.
"But I'd hate to have him for a geology teacher," Tom answered.
The mountains didn't seem much nearer than they had looked for half an
hour when the train finally rolled up to the Glacier Park station and
stopped. The boys, together with several tourists, got off, and the
minute they stepped on the platform they felt how much cooler it was
than back in St. Paul, and how much purer the air.
"Take a big lungful, Joey," Tom cried. "This is the real old ozone!"
The station is at the gate of the mountains, where the railroad enters
the pass which takes it through the range. The mountains here do not
look very high, for you are so close under that you do not see much of
them. The boys looked up at a ragged wall to the north, covered first
with fir timber and then with snow patches on the reddish rocks. Behind
them to the east, they looked out over the rolling plains. Close by the
station was a big hotel, several stories high, but built entirely of
huge fir logs. Even the tall columns in front were single logs.
"I suppose I go up there and report," said Tom. "Let's see if our
baggage is all here, first"
They found the baggage on the platform, and set out for the hotel,
passing on the way an Indian tepee, with pictures painted on the
outside, and smoke ascending from the peak. This was the home of old
Chief Three Bears, the boys learned, a Blackfeet Indian who lives here
by the hotel in summer, and welcomes arriving guests. He was coming down
the path, in fact, as the boys walked up, a tall Indian, over six feet,
and looking taller still because of his great feathered head-dress. He
was very old, but still erect, though his face was covered all over with
tiny wrinkles.
The two scouts stopped and saluted him.
Old Three Bears smiled at them, and grunted, "Okeea" (with the accent on
the first syllable, and the _ee_ and _a_ sounds slid together). Then he
held his blanket around him with his left hand, and putting out his
right, solemnly shook both boys by their hands.
"Say, the old Chief's got a big fist, all right," said Joe, as they went
on. "I'll bet he was strong once."
"He must 'a' been good looking, too," said Tom. "I didn't know Indians
were so big and--and sort of noble looking."
They now entered the great lobby of the hotel, which, like the outside,
was all made of fir logs, with tremendous trunks, bark and all, used as
the columns clear to the fourth story. Hunting out the manager, they
learned that they were to take the motor bus for Many Glacier Hotel in
fifteen minutes, and they just had time to go to the news stand and
secure a government map of the Park and a government report about its
geology, before turning in their baggage checks and climbing aboard the
bus, a four-seated motor something like a "Seeing New York" automobile.
This bus was full, three on a seat, and a moment later the driver
cranked his engine, gave a toot on his horn, and they were off.
CHAPTER V--The Scouts Learn Why the Rocky Mountains Have No Foot-Hills
and Arrive at Many Glacier
They had about fifty miles to go, northward, straight away from the
railroad. It was a clear, lovely day, the air so transparent that you
could apparently walk to the top of one of those mountains in an hour or
two.
"Gee, I know now how that Englishman felt," Joe laughed.
The road was not what would be called a good road, or even a decent
road, in the East, as it was only a track in the grass, full of sand and
sharp little stones; it did not lead into the mountains at all; it ran
along just to the east of the great range, over the bare, rolling hills
of the prairie, so that from the motor bus you could see the entire
mountain wall, mile after mile. What a wonderful wall it was, too! It
sprang right up out of this rolling green prairie, a great procession of
peaks, and now they were so near the boys could see they were not blue
at all, but every color of the rainbow, with red predominating. Up their
sides for a way stretched timber--all evergreen, and not very big--and
then came the rocks--red rocks, yellow rocks, gray rocks, white rocks,
in long horizontal strata, and in the ravines and hollows on the slopes
great patches of snow stretching down from the snow caps on the summits
like vast white fingers.
As they sped along, every eye in the motor fixed on the mountains, a man
in the front seat pointed ahead to a huge red mountain which stood out
eastward from the range, a noble mountain shaped like a tremendous dome.
"That's old Rising Wolf," he said.
"Rising Wolf!" said Tom. "That's a good name. It's Indian, I suppose?"
"It's Indian, but it was the name of a white man," the first speaker
replied. "It was the name the Indians gave to Hugh Monroe. He's buried
almost under the shadow of that mountain. Pretty good monument, eh?"
"I don't believe anybody'll move it," Joe laughed. "Who was Hugh
Monroe?"
"Hugh Monroe," said the man on the front seat, who evidently knew a lot
about the Park, "was probably the first white man who ever saw those
mountains. He was born in Montreal in 1798. He entered the Hudson Bay
Company when he was only seventeen, about as old as you boys, I guess,
and was sent way out into the Blackfeet Indian country on the
Saskatchewan River. Monroe was assigned to live with the Indians, and
learn their language, and the next winter--1816--he went southward with
them, following along near the base of the range, crossed what's now the
boundary line, and came here. He even went on farther, to the
Yellowstone. Monroe stayed with the Blackfeet all the rest of his life.
He married a squaw, and got an Indian name--Makwiipowaksin--or Rising
Wolf----"
"I guess I'll always say it in English," Spider laughed.
"After a while," the man went on, laughing too, "the Blackfeet came down
here to live. We are going through part of their reservation now, and
the whole Park was bought from them by the government. This was all
their hunting ground, and right here, in Two Medicine Valley that you
see leading in beside Rising Wolf Mountain, and in the Cut Bank and St.
Mary's Valley we'll soon come to, Hugh Monroe hunted moose and elk and
buffalo and silver tips, and he killed sheep and goats up on the slopes.
He used to tell me how he had a cabin by St. Mary Lake (we get there in
an hour) once, and had to stand off a raid of hostile Indians for two
days--he and his wife and children. He's often told me, too, how he and
the Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over the Cut Bank River cliffs.
The buffalo would stampede, and not seeing the cliffs ahead, would all
go crashing over."
"_He_ told you?" cried Joe, incredulous. "Say, how old are you, anyhow?
I thought you said he came here in 1816--that's a hundred years ago."
Again the man laughed. "Rising Wolf was buried in 1896," he answered.
"He was ninety-eight years old. We folks out in the Montana mountains"
[he pronounced Montana with the first _a_ short, as in _cat_] "live a
good while, son. It's the air. I can remember him well, and a fine old
figure he was, a real pioneer, like Daniel Boone and the chaps you've
read about in school. Yes sir, he's got a good monument."
And the man looked up again at the great red dome of Rising Wolf
Mountain, towering over them.
"Ask him about there being no foot-hills," Joe whispered, nudging Tom.
"Can you tell us why there aren't any foot-hills to this range?" Tom
asked. "Of course, all this prairie here is rolling and high, but it's
not really little mountains. The main range just jumps right up without
any warning."
"Yes, I've been wondering about that, too," put in a man on the seat
behind the boys. "I wish you would explain it."
The man on the front seat laughed. "I seem to be the Park encyclopaedia,"
said he. "Well, I hunted in these mountains before the government ever
thought of making a park of 'em, and I'm glad to tell you all I can.
I'll tell you just as it was told to me by one of the government chaps
that came out here--a scientist. He was looking for prehistoric animal
fossils up in the Belly River Canon, and he sure knew a lot. It was this
way--all the prairies, he said, and all the land west of here, was once
the bottom of the sea, or a lake, or something, and finally it pushed up
and became land, and then, as the earth crust went on contracting, it
cracked."
The man now put his hands together, spread flat side by side, and pushed
them one against the other.
"The crack formed from north to south," he said, "and as the contraction
went on something had to give, just as something has to give if I push
my hands hard enough. See----"
He pushed harder yet, and his left hand slid up over the back of his
right.
"That's what happened here. One edge of the earth crust, thousands of
feet thick, rose right up and slid east a dozen miles or more, and then
stopped. I believe the scientific fellers call that a fault. They call
the eastern edge of this range the Lewis overthrust, because that's
where the overlapping stopped. Look--you can see all along here the
precipices where the crust stuck out over the prairie, and all those
parallel lines of different colored rocks are the different layers in
the old crust. They find the skeletons and fossils exposed in 'em, which
would be buried two or three thousand feet if you had to dig down."
"But what I don't see," Joe said, "is why the top isn't just level? Why
are there any peaks and valleys?"
"It happened a few million years ago, son," the man laughed. "I suppose
things were some broken up at the first crack, and since then glaciers
have come grinding down, and rains have fallen, and snows melted, and
frosts cracked, and the ice and water have washed out canyons and carved
the peaks. The high point was right where the undercrust stopped, back a
dozen miles or more from the edge of the overthrust, so that became the
Divide. That's pretty near level in places even to-day. But east and
west the running water has carved out long valleys and left harder rock
sticking up as peaks. Up farther north old Chief Mountain sticks right
out into the prairie, a tower of limestone, with everything else around
it carved right away."
"I get you," said Joe. "I bet I'd have studied geography harder if I'd
had these mountains to look at while I was doing it!"
The man in the seat behind laughed. "There must have been some shake up
when the crack formed, and these six thousand feet of crust came up
over."
"I'd rather been some place else than standin' right on 'em," said the
man in front.
The motor presently rolled through rather thick pine timber, up over a
high ridge, and down into a valley.
"That's Divide Mountain to the left," said their guide. "Behind it is
Triple Divide Peak. From the peak, the water flows to three oceans--west
to the Pacific, east to the Missouri River, the Mississippi and the Gulf
of Mexico, northeast to Canada and Hudson Bay. From here on all the
brooks we cross are bound for Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean."
In a short time they came to the foot of a lovely lake, and stopped at a
group of buildings, built like Swiss chalets, on the shore.
"St. Mary Lake," their impromptu guide said. "A lot of people think it's
the most beautiful lake in the world, but you have to get to the upper
end to see its full beauty. It runs twelve miles, right up to the foot
of the Great Divide. That's Going-to-the-Sun Mountain you can just see
the peak of on the right."
The scouts looked far up the dancing, wonderfully green-blue waters of
the lake, to the tip of a vast pyramid of rock, blue with distance.
"Is that an Indian name? It's pretty," said Joe.
"No," the man answered. "A French missionary priest, who came here with
Hugh Monroe back in the 1830's named the lake St. Mary Lake, and then he
went on up it, and over the pass to the west, into the setting sun. So
Monroe named the mountain Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But, of course, it
was really Indian in a way, because if Monroe hadn't lived with the
Indians he wouldn't have thought of such a poetic name."
The boys were still only half-way to their destination, and the bus soon
started off again, still keeping on the prairie, along the eastern edge
of the range, and passing along the shore of Lower St. Mary Lake for
many miles. At last the road turned sharp west, and began to climb. It
climbed into a deep, narrow valley which led right up into the tumbled
mass of red and gray and green peaks and rock precipices.
"This is the last stage," said the man. "We are going up the Swift
Current Valley."
The road was very narrow, and it swung around ledges where there was a
massive wall above them on one side and a sheer drop, without
protection, on the other. The bus had a siren horn, which the driver set
going three hundred yards before he reached one of these curves. As they
climbed, the great mountainsides seemed to come nearer and nearer, and
at last they towered over their heads, some of them almost
perpendicular, and composed of layers of jagged red rock. It was not
long before they crossed the tumbling green water of Swift Current River
on a bridge close to a foaming waterfall, and brought up in front of a
large hotel on the shore of a small green lake.
This was the end of their journey. The scouts got out, and went around
to the lake in front of the hotel. Here the full view was spread before
them, and Tom whistled, while Joe gasped.
Right in front of them lay Lake McDermott, perhaps a mile long and half
a mile wide, the water a beautiful green, for all the lakes in the Park
are fed from glaciers, and glacier water is green in color. This lake
was surrounded by a fringe of pines. Out of the farther side sprung up a
cone-shaped mountain, almost out of the water. To the left and right of
this peak, called Sharp's Peak, and only two or three miles behind it,
rose the abrupt head wall of the Continental Divide itself, a vast gray
precipice, with great peaks thrusting up from it, and gleaming white
snow-fields lying like gigantic sheets spread out to dry wherever there
was a place for them to cling. Behind the hotel, on both sides, nearer
mountains went up precipitously.
"It's some big!" Joe exclaimed. "Say--it--it kind of scares me! Think of
climbing one of those cliffs!"
"We'll get used to it," Tom declared. "And we're going to climb 'em!
We're going to get photographs of a goat, and see this old Park, top and
bottom."
"Gosh, it looks all top to me," poor Joe replied.
"Come on--we'll find our boss, and get our tent pitched, and some grub
into us--and we'll feel better," Tom cried cheerfully.
CHAPTER VI--Tom Becomes Boss of the Tepee Camp, and the Scouts Pitch
Their Tent in the Evergreens
Just around the lower end of the lake from the great Many Glacier Hotel,
perched up on a little slope, were two or three chalets, like those at
St. Mary Lake, where tourists could stay at less expense than at the
hotel. A little farther along, directly on the shore of the lake, the
boys saw a group of tall white tepees.
"There's our home, I guess--if I get the job," said Tom. "We won't have
far to haul the water, anyhow."
Tom led Joe into the big lobby of the hotel, which was supported to the
roof by huge tree trunks for pillars, and found that he ought to report
to the manager of the chalet camp, so he and Joe walked back over the
bridge by the falls, and climbed to the office of the chalets.
"So you are Seymour, eh?" the manager said. He was a big, merry looking
man, with a high, squeaky voice, and was always bustling about. But the
boys liked him at once. "I don't know whether you're old enough to
manage the tepee camp or not. Can you cut wood?"
"Yes, sir," said Tom.
"Can you make a bed?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you count change?"
"When I've got any."
The man laughed, his large shoulders shaking up and down.
"Well, I'll try you a week--I've got nobody else. What's your friend
going to do?"
"I brought a tent of my own," Tom explained, "and I thought I could
pitch it just into the woods somewhere, out of sight, and we'd live in
that, and Joe's going to get our meals, so's I can give all my time to
looking after the tepees--couldn't we do that?"
The man turned to Joe. "Are you a good cook?" he asked.
"I can cook camp stuff all right, and make bread, and things like that,"
said Joe.
"Can you throw a diamond hitch?"
"I don't know--I never tried," Joe replied.
The man tipped back his head and squeaked with mirth again. "That's like
the man who said he didn't know whether he could play the violin or
not--he'd never tried," said he. "My boy, it takes years and years of
patient practice to learn to throw a diamond hitch. But if you only
could throw one, you could probably help us out this summer as a camp
cook on lots of expeditions. We are going to be hard up for cooks this
year."
"I bet I can learn!" cried Joe. "I can tie all kinds of knots,--the
Becket hitch, and the bowline, and the false reef and the fisherman's
bend, and the sheep-shank and the timber hitch----"
"Whoa!" the man laughed. "Well, we'll see. Come on now, and get your
tent and stuff, and we'll go over and look at the camp. I suppose,
though, you'd like some grub first, wouldn't you?"
"I could eat a couple of prunes," said Tom.
"I got space for an olive and an oyster cracker, myself," said Joe.
"Well, pile in there and get a bite," the man said, pointing to a small
room where the few helpers he needed in the chalets were eating. The
scouts needed no second invitation, after their fifty mile motor ride,
and they fell on the food hungrily.
"Say, Big Bertha's all to the good," Joe whispered to Tom, "if he does
talk like a lady."
"Sure he is--he can't help havin' a squeaky voice," Tom answered. "He's
treating us white, all right."
As soon as they were partially filled up--(they ate until they dared not
ask for more)--the scouts went back to the hotel, with two borrowed
wheelbarrows, and got their trunks and luggage. Then Big Bertha joined
them, and they all three continued to the tepee camp, which was pitched
between the trail and the shore of the lake. There were six or eight
tepees, of stout white canvas stretched on a frame of lodge pole pines.
Each tepee had a wooden floor and one of them contained a few cooking
implements and a small cook-stove. The rest were for sleeping, and
contained a couple of cots apiece.
"Now, this camp is used mostly by tourists who are going through the
Park on foot," Big Bertha explained. "You are to charge them fifty cents
a night per bed. They get the use of the range and cooking utensils
free, and they're supposed to wash 'em, but they probably won't. Your
job is to keep the camp clean, have wood always cut up for fires, make
the beds, change the linen (you get that from me), collect the fees,
attend to the latrine carefully, and--oh, just run the place as if it
was the Waldorf-Astoria! The store where they buy grub, and you get
yours, is up at the chalets."
"I get you," said Tom. "Doesn't look as if it had been used much this
year."
"It hasn't. There's still so much snow on the passes that not many
hikers have been over. But they'll be along in a week or so, though. You
go ahead and pitch your own tent now, for Joe--somewhere out there in
the woods. I guess if you boys are scouts you know how to do it right."
"Is the lake good to swim in?" Joe asked.
Big Bertha looked at him with a funny expression. "Sure," he said. "Try
it, after you've got your tent up! Oh, and say, look out for porcupines
at night, boys."
Only a few feet beyond the tepees the heavy woods began, not high woods,
but a thick stand of fir about thirty or forty feet tall. The scouts
took the tent and baggage in far enough to be out of sight of the camp,
and screened from the view of the hotel across the lake, but still close
to the shore. They found a dry, well-drained, level spot, threw a rope
over it from tree to tree, and slung the tent. Then they cut pegs,
fastened it down, set up their cots inside, and while Joe was making the
beds, Spider hauled a lot of rocks up from the edge of the lake and
built a fire pit.
"I s'pose it's going to rain sometimes," he said. "We ought to have a
shelter over the kitchen."
"Don't look now as if it ever rained here," Joe answered, from the tent.
"I'll build a lean-to over the kitchen while you're running the camp.
Gosh, I'm goin' to feel like an awful grafter, just doing nothing, while
you're working all the time."
"Aw, cut it out," Tom answered. "You'll be cooking for me, won't you?
You're my housekeeper. I'm going to call you wifey."
"If you do, I'll put chestnut burrs in your bed," Joe laughed.
"Where are you going to get the chestnuts?" asked Tom. "I don't see
anything around here but evergreen. Come to think of it, I've not seen a
single hardwood all day."
"Golly, that's so," Joe answered. "I don't believe I have. It's going to
be hard cooking with nothing but pine. How's a feller going to get a bed
of coals?"
"I guess he isn't. But I'll see what can be done."
Tom went into the woods with one of the axes, while Joe busied himself
about camp, making a shelf on a tree for the provisions, getting the
trunks stowed away under the cots, rigging up a rough table out of two
pieces of board he went back to the tepee camp and hunted up, and
planning for a lean-to to be built later as a shelter while cooking.
Tom came back presently, his arms loaded with dry wood.
"All soft," he said, stacking it near the fire-pot. "There's not a
hardwood in the forest anywhere. Come on, now, we've got to get a supply
cut for the camp, in case anybody comes. If they don't come, we can cook
on the stove there, I guess. It'll be easier than here."
"And not so much fun," said Joe.
The two boys worked industriously for the next hour, Tom doing the heavy
chopping, and got a good pile of wood stacked up beside the stove in the
camp. It was nearly five o'clock now, and still no one had appeared, so
they went back to their tent, being hot and tired, put on a set of
summer underclothes for bathing suits, and ran down to the lake. The
bottom dropped away rather gradually, over rough stones, so they could
not dive. Tom was the first in. He went in up to his knees, and emitted
a yell that echoed from the wall of pines across the water.
"Wow!" he cried, "sufferin' snakes!"
"Is it cold?" said Joe, still standing on the shore.
"Oh, no, it ain't cold! Oh, no, it's warm as a hot potato!"
Spider took another step forward and slipped into a hole nearly up to
his waist, lost his balance, and went under. He came up spitting water,
and made a wild leap for the shore.
"You keep out o' this, Joe," he spluttered. "It's too cold for you to go
in. Talk about glacier water--not for me!"
"I want to try it," pleaded Joe.
"No, you don't!"--and Spider grabbed him by the arm and dragged him
back.
As Tom peeled off his suit and reached for a towel, Joe ran for their
little camp mirror.
"Look at yourself," he said.
Tom looked. He was as red as a boiled lobster from head to foot.
"It's a wonder there ain't icicles on my elbows," he laughed. "You heat
yourself some water on the fire, Joe, if you want a bath!"
Which was exactly what Joe did.
They were hardly dressed again, and beginning to prepare supper, when
they heard a great clatter of hoofs and shouting coming down the trail.
They ran through their fringe of woods, coming out on the trail a little
way above the camp, and galloping toward them they saw a procession on
horseback, shouting, laughing, screaming. At the head rode a cowboy,
well in the lead, and holding his horse back. It was a big, bay horse,
with a white star in its forehead, and full of ginger. The cowboy wore
white fur chaps on his legs, and spurs, and a broad-brimmed felt hat.
Behind him came another guide, also in cowboy costume, and then almost a
dozen men and women, evidently tourists. Some of them knew how to ride,
but more of them evidently did not. The women were bouncing around in
their saddles and screaming, but nobody stopped. The race for home had
begun, and the horses intended to finish at a gallop. As the leader
thundered past the two boys, they saw with admiration how firmly he sat
in his saddle, like a part of the horse, and looked calmly back over his
shoulder with a laugh. Then they saw him touch the horse with his spurs,
and it sprang forward with a bound, while the rest came tearing on
behind. As one woman passed the scouts, her last hairpin flew out, and
her hair came tumbling down in a braid, which began bobbing up and down
on her back.
"Gee, that's the life!" Tom cried. "We simply _got_ to learn to ride
horseback, Joe. I bet they've been over a pass, or something, to-day."
"I bet some of 'em are going to eat off the mantelpiece to-morrow," Joe
replied.
They went back by way of the camp, to see if any hikers had arrived, and
then got their supper, a rather smoky job, with only soft wood to cook
by. But they were too hungry to mind the smoke. After supper they walked
around to the great hotel, which was not yet lighted up, for though it
was now seven o'clock, it was still broad daylight, and bought souvenir
postcards to send home to their parents and the other scouts. As yet
the hotel had few guests, for the season had hardly begun, the snow had
lain so late on the passes that year, but there was music and bustle
about the place, just the same, and another party on horseback was just
galloping in, so the boys could watch the tired riders dismount, and the
cowboy guides drive the horses away, down the road to their night
feeding on the lower meadows. Joe longed to ask one of those cowboys to
show him what that mysterious thing, a diamond hitch, was, but he did
not have the nerve.
It was still quite light enough to read a newspaper when they returned
to camp. Nobody had come, and as it had been a hard day, and Tom saw Joe
was tired, he gave orders to turn in, though the lights in the great
hotel across the lake, under the vast wall of Allen Mountain, were just
twinkling on.
"Seems foolish to go to bed by daylight," he said, "but it's nine
o'clock, and you're a sick little wifey."
"You'll be a sick little hubby, in about a minute and a quarter," Joe
retorted, swinging at him. "Still, I feel as if I could sleep, daylight
or not."
"Come here," Tom went on, "and let's see how your old temperature is. If
you've got a fever to-night it means you got to stay still for the next
week, and rest up."
He shook down the little clinical thermometer Dr. Meyer had given him,
and put it under Joe's tongue. "Smoke that a while," he laughed.
After a couple of minutes he took it out again and inspected it.
"Ninety-eight," said he. "That's normal, ain't it? Hooray, old Joey, no
temperature even after this day! I guess you're getting better, all
right."
"Sure I am," Joe laughed. "I'm going to climb to the top of the Great
Divide to-morrow!"
The night came on as they were getting ready to bunk, and with it came a
sudden coolness.
"I guess we're going to be glad of these blankets, after all," Tom said,
"and you won't be sorry your mother put in that puff."
"You bet I won't," Joe answered, climbing into his cot, and pulling the
puff up about him.
Tom took a last look at the fire, at the still woods, at the lake
glimmering down through the trees, picked up his sweater, which he had
dropped on the ground, and hung it idly over a log by the fire, pulled
the tent flap together, blew out the candle in the camp lantern, and
also crawled in.
"Well, Joe," he said, "we've begun our life five thousand feet up, at
the feet of the glaciers."
Joe's answer was a snore.
CHAPTER VII--Joe Gets Acquainted with Porcupines, the Diamond Hitch,
and Switchback Trails
Some hours later the boys were awakened by a tremendous clatter just
outside the tent. They both sprang up and rushed out. It was pitch dark,
the last ember of the fire had died, and they could see nothing. But
they could hear something scampering away in the underbrush.
"Is it a bear?" Joe whispered. "Gee, I wish they'd let you have a gun in
the Park!"
Tom jumped into the tent and lit the lantern. By its dim rays, they saw
what had made the clatter. Half their little stock of canned goods and
other provisions had been knocked down off the shelf Joe had built.
"I know--porcupines!" Spider cried. "Remember, Big Bertha told us to
look out for 'em."
They carried their provisions back into the tent, and went to sleep
again.
Tom was the first up. Joe heard him muttering and exclaiming outside the
tent, and crawled out to see what was the matter.
"Matter? Matter?" Spider shouted. "Look at this--and this!"
He held up his sweater in one hand, and one of the scout axes in the
other. One entire sleeve of the sweater was gone, and the handle of the
axe was so chewed up that it was practically useless.
"Holy smoke, what did that?"
Before Tom could answer, there was a movement in the undergrowth, and
both boys sprang toward it. There, sure enough, was the culprit--a fat
porcupine, surprised by their quick descent, and backing away from them
with every quill rigid and ready for business. Tom grabbed a heavy
stick, and was about to hit it, when Joe stopped him.
"Wait a minute--I want to see it work," he said. "I want to see if they
really throw their quills. You keep him here."
Joe quickly hunted up a rotten stick, and gingerly poked it at the
porcupine, which bit at the end viciously, and filled it full of quills,
but he certainly didn't "shoot" them. The stick had to touch them first
before they came out.
"There, now you see the story's a fake," Tom cried, "so good-night,
Pork,--you'll pay for my sweater, you beast, you!"
He brought his club down on the poor animal's head, and laid it out.
"I kind of hate to see him killed," said Joe.
"I hate to kill animals myself, but we got to keep our sweaters and
axes," Tom answered. "We'll make an Indian belt, or something, of the
quills, and send it home to the kids."
They were still talking about the porcupine as they got breakfast.
"Don't seem as though a woollen sweater sleeve and a wooden axe handle
were exactly what you'd call nourishing," said Joe.
"I'd rather have bacon," Tom laughed. "He looks fat, too."
As they were speaking, they heard steps in the woods, and a second later
a tall, thin, tanned man in a khaki-colored uniform, with leather riding
gaiters and a wide-brimmed felt hat, appeared in their little clearing.
The two scouts rose quickly, in surprise.
"Hello, boys," the man said, as his blue eyes took in them and every
detail of the camp at a single piercing glance, "goin' to have porcupine
for breakfast?"
"He'll never have my sweater for breakfast again!" Tom replied.
The man laughed--or, rather, he smiled. It was really a kind of inside
laugh, noiseless. Even his voice was low, so you had to listen sharply
to hear what he was saying.
"They'll eat the clothes off your back if you let 'em," said he.
"But why do they eat such--such dry stuff? It's worse than patent
breakfast food without cream," said Joe.
"Salt," the man replied. "They'll eat anything a man or a horse has
touched, to get it salty with perspiration--an axe handle, for instance.
I knew a lumber jack once who had a grudge against a feller, so he put
salt on his cabin roof, and the porcs came in the night and ate the roof
most off. There come a rain the next day, too."
The boys laughed. They wanted to ask their visitor who he was, but
didn't see quite how to bring it about. Finally Tom said, "Won't--won't
you have some breakfast?"
"Had mine," the man answered. "Might take a cup of coffee, though. Yours
smells good."
He sat down on the log which was serving the boys as a chair, first
easing his belt holster, which held a 38-calibre automatic.
"He must be a Park Ranger," Tom whispered to Joe. "Nobody else can carry
arms in the Park, they say."
Joe brought him a cup of coffee, and as he took it, he said, "Well,
boys, I hear you're goin' to look after the tepee camp. Thought I'd come
down to inspect you. I'm the Ranger for this district. Mills is my name.
My cabin's just up the trail a piece toward Swift Current. Let me know
if I can do anything for you."
"Thank you, sir," said Joe. "Some time, if you--you'd----"
He hesitated, turning red at the boldness of his demand.
The Ranger waited in silence, only keeping a pale blue eye on his face,
but a kindly eye.
"----if you'd show me how to throw a diamond hitch."
"Is that all?" said the Ranger, with one of his silent laughs. "I
thought you were goin' to ask me for a thousand dollars. I can show you
the diamond hitch 'most any time. I'm packing off to-day, about ten.
Come around and get a lesson. Ride a horse, either of you?"
"Well, we ride just a little--farm horses out to plowing, and things
like that," Spider replied.
"I have an extra horse. Maybe one of you'll come along with me some day
when you both ain't needed in the camp. If you can always make coffee
like this I'd like you along."
"Joe's the cook," Tom said. "He can go any time. It's I who am running
the camp. He's just loafing and getting well. He's been sick."
"Well, Joe, you come out to my cabin at ten, and you can see me throw a
hitch," the Ranger said, getting up, "and ride up the trail with me a
spell, if you want."
Joe's eyes grew big with excitement. "I'll be there!" he cried.
The Ranger went back again, and the two scouts looked at each other.
"Say, he's some prince!" Joe exclaimed. "But I don't like to be getting
the first ride ahead of you. I wouldn't do it, only if I learn to ride,
and tie a pack on, maybe I can get a job as cook."
"Go to it, old scout," Tom answered. "That's what we came here for."
After breakfast Tom went over to the chalets to report and to do some
work around the camp, and before ten o'clock Joe was at the Ranger's log
cabin.
Mills, the Ranger, had three horses out of the little stable behind, and
was putting a saddle on the largest horse.
"Go get the other saddle from the stable, and let's see you put it on
your horse," he said.
Joe brought the saddle, a regular western saddle, with the high back and
the horn in front, and did his best to get it on. The Ranger watched him
a minute, and then showed him how to cinch it properly and tight.
"Don't be afraid to pull it hard," he said. "The old nag'll lose some of
his belly before he gets home, and if you've not cinched it tight your
saddle will slip."
Mills now put a saddle blanket on the third horse, and then a pack
saddle, which is a framework of wood, arranged like a saddle underneath
with a cinch belt under the belly and a broad canvas belt extending
around the back and under the tail. After this is put on the horse the
wooden frame of the saddle makes a kind of platform on each side to rest
the pack upon. The Ranger now brought out his stuff--dunnage bags, an
axe, blankets, a canvas covering, and a long rope.
"You hold his head," said he to Joe, "and talk to him real kind, while I
hang the bags on."
One bag was hung on one side, one on the other, to balance the pack, and
then, while the horse tried to do a one-step on Joe's toes with his
front legs, and kick Mills in the stomach with his hind legs, the Ranger
threw the blankets on top, done up in a flat roll, over the whole
saddle, and covered them with the tarpaulin. Finally, he took the long
rope, which Joe saw had a canvas band and strap on one end, and fastened
this strap, like a cinch, around the horse's belly.
"Now," said he, "we are ready to throw a hitch. Come here and help.
We'll throw a double one, because that's stronger."
Joe soon saw that the process consists of weaving the rope back and
forth under the sides of the saddle and then crossways over the top, in
such a way that when it is done the strands of rope, from above, would
be seen to make a diamond. Each time the rope was passed over to Mills,
he took the end, braced one foot against the horse, and pulled it taut.
Joe did the same on his side.
"Won't I hurt the horse?" he asked.
The Ranger laughed. "I give you leave, if you can," he said.
When the rope was all used, Mills fastened the end, went over the whole
thing with his hand, testing it to see if it was tight, and then
finished by giving the horse a resounding slap.
"That's the way you have to finish," he said, "or the horse wouldn't
think you were through."
"I wouldn't think the horse would like to be packed much," Joe
suggested.
"Never knew one that did," Mills replied. "Lots o' times, while you're
throwing the hitch, that canvas band under the tail works up and sort o'
tickles the horse, and then, Oh, Boy, look out! Your plug'll buck, and a
packhorse don't reckon he's done a real good job o' buckin' till he's
covered about three square acres of ground, and deposited canned beef,
tea, syrup, blankets, axes, coffee-pots and a few other things entirely
over said area. Then, when you cinch him tight before you start, too,
he's likely to feel that's goin' to interfere with his digestion, and
start buckin'. A packhorse is an ornery critter."
But this horse, now he was packed, was quiet as a kitten, waiting for
the party to start. The Ranger called to Joe's horse, which had wandered
away.
"Now mount," said Mills.
Joe, on the right side of his horse, started to put his right foot into
the stirrup, and the horse shied away from him, almost spilling him on
the ground.
"First lesson," said the Ranger. "Never get on a horse from the right.
Some of 'em don't mind, but most of 'em do. No use tempting Providence."
Joe came around to the left side, and grasping the horse by the mane and
the saddle horn, swung himself up.
"Now, just stand up as straight-legged as you can, and see how many
fingers you can put between your saddle and the crotch of your legs."
"Two," said Joe. "Oughtn't my stirrups to be shorter?"
"If you want to ride like a bally British monkey, or a jockey, yes,"
Mills answered. "If you want to ride like a regular human bein', they're
just right. Let's see you trot."
Joe tightened the reins and gave his horse a jab with his heels, and the
animal started off with abrupt suddenness, at a sharp trot. Poor Joe
began to bob up and down, and bang the base of his spine against the
saddle. He tried to rise on his toes with the motion of the horse, but
that, he felt, only made him the more awkward. The Ranger came up
alongside, and passed him.
"Watch me," he said. "Just barely stand in your stirrups, comfortable
like, bend forward from your hips, and let your body, not your legs,
keep the gait."
He trotted ahead, and Joe saw with admiration that his shoulders hardly
bobbed up and down at all. He did his best to imitate him, and after a
while felt as if he were getting on to the hang of it. But they couldn't
trot far, because the packhorse was following them, all by himself, and
if he trotted it shook up his pack too much. So they pulled down to a
walk, and climbed the trail, first the Ranger, then Joe, then the
patient packhorse, through woods at first, and across a roaring, racing
little green river, which foamed up against the horses' legs and made
Joe hold up his feet under him to keep them dry.
"I'm going over Swift Current Pass," the Ranger said, "and on up the
Mineral Creek Canon on the other side, and then down into the Little
Kootenai River country, to open the trail a bit. You can come with me to
the top of the pass, and pick up some party to bring you back."
"I wish I could come all the way!" Joe exclaimed.
Mills laughed another of his silent laughs. "You're ambitious for a sick
boy and a tenderfoot," he said. "You'll be sore enough, with fourteen
miles, to-night."
They were getting out of high timber now, into stunted limber pines,
which were covered all over with bright reddish-pink cone buds, like
flowers, and everywhere in the grass and trees around them Joe saw more
beautiful wild flowers, and more kinds of wild flowers, than he had ever
seen in his life before. It was like riding through a garden, with
tremendous red mountain precipices for walls. Beside the trail was the
Swift Current River, every now and then widening out into a lovely
little green lake, and directly ahead of them, at the head of the canyon,
rose an almost perpendicular wall of rock for two thousand feet, to a
lofty shelf, on which Swift Current Glacier, snow-covered now, hung like
a gigantic white napkin. To the right was the Egyptian pyramid of Mount
Wilbur. From the glacier, down over the precipice, were falling half a
dozen white streams of waterfalls, like great silver ribbons. As they
got nearer and nearer to this head wall, and it seemed to rise higher
and higher over them, while the walls on each side of them, the one
across the canyon bright red, also grew higher and higher, Joe began to
get nervous.
"Say," he finally asked, "are we going to _climb_ that?"
Mills looked back at him with a grin.
"Sure," he said.
"Well, I don't see how," Joe answered. "I'm no goat."
[Illustration: Switchback Trail up Swift Current Pass]
Mills laughed again, but said no more. Instead, he plodded steadily on,
till the great cliff wall seemed about to hit them in the face, and Joe
could hear the thunder of the white waterfalls as they leaped and
plunged down from the melting glacier two thousand feet over his head.
Just as he had decided the Ranger was playing a joke on him, for surely
nobody could get up those walls, the trail turned sharp to the right,
and began to go up.
Then Joe learned what a Rocky Mountain switchback is.
A switchback trail can be put up almost any slope that is not actually
perpendicular, and the slope they were climbing now was not quite that,
though to Joe it seemed pretty near it. The trail was about four or five
feet wide, and was dug right out of the side of the hill. It went up at
an angle of about twenty degrees, for perhaps two hundred feet to the
right, then it swung sharp left on a steep hairpin turn and ran another
two hundred or three hundred feet, took another sharp hairpin turn, and
so on up, and up. When Joe had made one of these turns, he could look
right down on the top of the blankets on the packhorse below him.
"Say," he called up to the Ranger, "what happens to you if your horse
falls off here?"
"Your horse never falls off," Mills answered. "If he did, you'd probably
take to harp playing. But he won't."
They climbed up these switchbacks for two thousand feet or so, and then
worked around a shoulder of the mountain so that they couldn't see the
glacier any more, but looking back down the canon Joe could see a great,
narrow hole, with the green lakes like a string of jewels at the bottom,
and at the far end, as blue and level as the ocean, the vast prairie.
"The prairie looks just like the ocean," he said.
"Does it?" said the Ranger. "I never saw the ocean. Must be fine."
In a minute or two they reached the first snow-field. Joe did not want
to appear too green and excited, but he was almost trembling with
excitement, just the same. He had reached the level of summer snow! He
was above timber-line, or almost above, and here in a great northern
hollow was a vast drift, four hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep in
the middle, which Mills said would not melt all summer! Little streams
of water were gushing out from the lower side, and the snow was very
soft and coarse, like rock salt. The trail went right across it, the
horses picking their way carefully over the treacherous footing. They
climbed but a little way more, and they were on the top of the pass.
When you think of a mountain pass, probably, you think of a deep valley
or canyon between the hills, but a pass is not like that at all in the
high Rockies. In order to get over the Continental Divide (which the
Indians called "the backbone of the world"), you have to climb, and the
pass is simply a point on this spine which is not quite so high as other
points, and can be reached, moreover, from the base. Joe found himself
in a little meadow which was full of stunted pine trees, the last of the
timber, with snowdrifts, and with bright gold dog-tooth violets, some of
them coming right up and blossoming through two inches of snow. On
either side of him, the Divide rose up perhaps another five hundred or a
thousand feet, in pyramids of naked rock. Ahead, to the west, he could
see a great hole, where the Divide dropped down on the other side, and
ten miles away across this hole a wonderful sharp-peaked mountain all
covered with snow, and looking like the pictures of the Alps in his old
geography.
"What's that mountain?" he asked.
"Heaven's Peak," said the Ranger. "Good name for it, eh?"
"It sure is!" said Joe.
Mills stopped the horses in a little grassy glade, sheltered from the
wind by a group of stunted pines, and unslung the packs.
"You're going to make me some more of that coffee," he laughed, opening
one of his dunnage bags.
While Joe was building the fire, Mills pointed up the great slope of
naked, tumbled rocks to the south. "Climb up there some day," said he,
"and down the other side, and you'll get on top of the Divide above
Swift Current Glacier. It's narrow--just a knife blade, and all along
the centre of it you'll see a game trail."
While they were eating lunch, Joe was amused to see the ground
squirrels--hundreds of them, it seemed--come up out of their holes in
the grass and look at the intruders. They sat up on their hind legs,
pressed their front paws against their stomachs, and made a _cheeping_
noise, almost like birds.
"Looks as if they were mechanical toys," Joe laughed, "and had to
squeeze their middles to get a sound."
He put a piece of bread down side of him, to fill his cup again, and
when he went to pick it up, it wasn't there--it was vanishing into a
hole!
"Mechanical toy, eh?" the Ranger grinned. "Pretty smart mechanism!"
Before they were through lunch, another party appeared from the west,
coming up into the pass, and dismounting. This was a regular tourist
party of men and women, with two cowboy guides.
"I thought they'd be along," said Mills. "I'm going to send you back
with them. And now here's what I really brought you for--I'll be gone
three or four days, and somebody's got to look after Popgun (that's the
horse you're riding). How'd you like to feed him every day, and give him
some water, and a bit o' exercise, just around the lake, mind you. I
don't want you riding off alone on the trails."
Joe gasped with surprise and delight. "You--you mean it?" he asked.
"Sure I mean it. Don't take me long to size folks up. I like you boys,
and maybe we can help each other. Pretty lonely in my cabin, you know."
Mills gave him directions about the feed, and then went over and spoke
to one of the guides. When he came back, he said to Joe, "Now, let's see
you throw a diamond hitch."
Joe did his best, but he had to have help.
"I could get it with two or three more tries, I bet!" he cried. "Then I
could get a job as cook with a party, maybe."
"There's a rope in the barn. You can be practicing," the Ranger laughed.
"So long."
"Good-bye, sir," Joe answered, as the lean Ranger swung into his saddle,
called to his packhorse as if it were a dog, and disappeared down the
trail to the west, the faithful packhorse plodding on behind.
The other party were a long time about their meal, and Joe climbed part
way up the peak to the south, getting above the last timber, which
consisted of tiny, twisted trees not over two feet high, and some of
them growing along the very ground. Up here he found beautiful, tiny
Alpine flowers in the rock crannies, he started up what looked like a
big black and gray woodchuck, and which he later learned was a whistling
marmot, and he came upon a bird, something like a partridge, but the
same gray color as the rocks. This bird was followed by six little
fluffy chicks, which went scuttering away with shrill little peeps into
the maze of stones, and ten feet away couldn't be seen, so like the
stones were they.
"That's protective coloring," Joe thought. "Wonder why they are colored
that way?"
He was later to learn that this was a ptarmigan hen and her chicks, the
largest bird which lives above timber in these mountains. No doubt it is
colored like the rocks to protect it from the eye of foxes, eagles, and
other foes.
Joe didn't dare climb any higher, though he longed to get to the top,
which now rose steep above him. He felt perfectly well, too, and the
climbing didn't make him cough. But he saw the party was packing up
again, so he hurried down and cinched up another notch in his saddle to
make sure it did not slip on the descent. He mounted and fell in behind
the procession, which immediately began winding its way down the steep
switchbacks. Joe, from the rear, could look almost directly down on the
head of the leader, a hundred feet below him. One or two of the women
were screaming, and now and then a stone, loosened by a house's hoof,
would go bounding down the slope with a terrifying rattle. But the
horses, carefully putting one foot ahead of the other, were as calm and
sure as if they were on level going, and nothing at all happened, of
course.
Once on the comparatively level trail below, the leading guide broke
into a trot, and the whole cavalcade came bouncing on behind. Joe
bounced at first as much as anybody, but by dint of much trial, he got
into the swing a little, and began to ride more comfortably. When they
were on the level trail in the woods at last, a mile from the lake, the
leader gave a yell, touched his spurs, and leaped out at a gallop. All
the other horses, without waiting for any command, started in to gallop
also, including Popgun. Joe yelled with the rest, jammed his cap on
hard, hung to the horn of his saddle to keep aboard, and felt the wind
rush against his face. Still galloping and shouting, the cavalcade
dashed past the Ranger's cabin, and on toward the tepee camp.
Joe hoped Spider would be around to see. He wanted to stop his horse at
the tepees, but whether he could or not was another question. Popgun
didn't appear to have any intention of stopping till the rest did.
As they dashed in sight of the camp, he saw Spider standing by the
trail. Joe yelled, "Hi--Tom!" and began to tug at the reins. Popgun came
down to a trot obediently--and also suddenly, very nearly sending Joe
out over his head. Another tug, and a "Whoa!" brought him up short,
though his ears were pricked up, and his eyes were following the
galloping cavalcade now disappearing toward the hotel.
"Well--_what_ are you doing?" exclaimed the astonished Tom.
"I'm a regular cowboy now, eh, what? Allow me to introduce Popgun, my
gallant broncho. We've been on top of the Great Divide, we have, and
seen the water going toward the Pacific, and, gee I know where there's a
game trail we can climb to, and I'm goin' to have this horse to ride for
three or four days, and feed him, and--and all."
"I bet you're sore to-night," said Tom.
"I bet I am, too. You try him. Gee, he's a fine old horse. You ought to
see him come down a trail--just as careful. Wow! and some trail, too!"
Joe dismounted, stiffly, with an "Ouch!" and Tom climbed into the
saddle. Popgun looked mildly around, to see what the change meant, and
then trotted obediently off.
Joe watched, laughing. There was no doubt that Tom bounced. He bounced
as much as the women. The harder he tried not to, the more he bounced.
"See, you got to do it this way," said Joe, as the other scout came
back. He started to mount again, with a leap, but his legs were so stiff
they'd hardly work.
"Very graceful, _very_ graceful indeed!" Tom taunted. "Why don't you get
a job in the movies, you're so graceful?"
"Maybe I will," Joe answered, finally getting into his saddle. "Now
look--here's the way."
He hit Popgun with his heels, and started up the trail, but before he
was out of sight a second cavalcade, with a cowboy at the head, came
thundering past. Popgun turned, and in spite of Joe's cries and tugs at
the rein, insisted on galloping with it. Hanging helpless to his saddle
horn, Tom saw Joe tearing past, in the middle of the crowd, and
disappearing toward the hotel.
Five minutes later he returned, looking very sheepish.
"I see just how to do it," Tom taunted. "Joe, you've got speed, but no
control!"
"You wait! I'll have old Popgun eating out of my hand yet," Joe
answered. "Guess I'll put him up now, and feed him."
"Yes, and then you come back and rest. You've been doing too much
to-day," said Tom.
When Joe got back, he found Tom busy at the camp. The first party of
hikers had arrived--ten of them, men about thirty-five years old from
Chicago, who were taking their vacation tramping through the Park. They
all wore high, heavy boots with hobnails, flannel shirts, khaki
trousers, and carried knapsacks on their backs. Tom was hustling around
buying provisions for them at the chalet store, fixing their bunks,
getting fresh water, making a fire in the stove, and so on, while two of
the men, who acted as cooks, were getting ready to cook the supper.
"Can I help?" Joe asked.
"No, you go back to our tent and rest," said Tom. "You can get our
supper, after you've thought a while about how graceful you are."
Joe went limping off, and was only too glad to lie down in the tent. He
lay on his side presently. He began to realize acutely, and locally,
that he had been riding horseback, fourteen miles, for the first time.
But he had supper ready when Tom came at six-thirty.
"How do you feel?" Tom demanded. "I bet you've been doing too much.
Tired? Got a fever?"
He got out the thermometer.
"I'm sore, all right, but I'm not very tired, not half as tired as I
used to get at home, just walking back from school."
Tom answered by putting the thermometer in his mouth.
"No fever at all--and you're all sweaty," he said a minute later. "You
really feeling better, old Joey?"
"Sure I am."
But Tom wouldn't let him help after supper in getting more wood for the
camp. Tom did it all, while Joe sat at first outside the tepees and
tried to hear the talk of the hikers about their trip, and later, when
Tom was through, moved closer to the "council fire," built in a ring of
stones, at the invitation of the men, and heard them tell of their
twenty-two mile hike that day over Piegan Pass from Upper St. Mary Lake.
It was fine to sit there, by the warm fire, as the darkness gathered
over the great, solemn wall of the Divide, as the lights in the hotel
across the lake twinkled on, as the night wind whispered in the pines,
and hear the talk of glaciers, and snow-fields, and ten-thousand-foot
climbs. It made Joe and Tom long for the day when they could get out,
with blanket and knapsack, over the high trails. They went back to their
tent at last reluctantly, while the hikers bade them a cheerful
good-night.
"Seems as if everybody in the Park was good-natured," Joe remarked, as
he crawled into bed. "Guess it's the air."
"I like everybody but the porcupines," Tom answered, carefully folding
what was left of his sweater under his pillow! "I wrote home for a new
one to-day, but I'll hang on to what I've got."
CHAPTER VIII--Joe Gets a Chance at Last to Go Out on a Trip as Camp Cook
The next few days were busy ones for both boys. Tom had hikers to take
care of now every day, sometimes only two or three at a time, sometimes
much larger parties, so that he had to wheel down more cots from the
chalets. There was much to do, cutting wood, hauling water, making beds,
raking and burning the litter after each party, for Tom had learned as a
scout that one of the worst things a camper can do is to leave any
litter behind him, and one of the best ways to collect flies around a
camp is to leave scraps and garbage unburned or unburied. He even went
over to the hotel and begged a can of stove polish from the kitchen, and
each day, after the crowd had gone, polished up the camp stove.
Big Bertha, coming down to look things over, found him busy at this job.
"Well, well," said he, in his funny, high voice, "I'd know you came from
New England. Must have a clean kitchen! The camp looks well, Tom, and
nobody's made a kick yet. I guess we can keep you another week."
Then he laughed in such a way that Tom knew his job was safe.
Meanwhile Joe divided his day between cooking the meals for Tom and
himself, building a lean-to kitchen and dining-room for rainy weather,
rigging up a porcupine-proof pantry with some old chicken wire he found
behind the hotel chicken yards, and feeding and riding the Ranger's
horse. Twice a day he took Popgun out for a spin, going down below the
hotel to the level meadows where the packhorses and saddle-horses rented
to the tourists were pastured at night, and there he galloped, trotted,
and jumped logs till he felt sure of himself, and all his saddle
soreness wore off. Sometimes, after the guests at the camp were gone,
and no new party had yet arrived, Tom took a try in the saddle, too, and
both of them, with packs made of their blankets and an old mattress,
practiced throwing a diamond hitch, while Popgun, who was being used for
the experiment, stood still, but looked around at them with a comical,
grieved expression, as much as to say, "What do you think I am, just an
old packhorse?"
The Ranger did not return for five days, and Joe was sorely tempted to
ride Popgun up one of the trails again, to the high places which lured
him--to Iceberg Lake, for instance, only six miles away, which everybody
talked about as being so beautiful. But he remembered what the Ranger
had said, and he never went more than a mile or two from camp. It was
certainly hard, with a good horse under you, and a bright sky overhead,
and the great towering red mountains all around, not to ride on and on,
higher and higher, into those wonderful upland meadows, and then on some
more to the sky-flung bridge of the Great Divide!
On the sixth morning, as Joe drew near the Ranger's cabin to feed and
water Popgun, he saw smoke coming out of the chimney. The door was open,
and inside he saw Mills just getting breakfast.
"Hello," he called.
"Oh, it's you," Mills answered, looking out. "Come make me some coffee,
will you?"
Joe entered, and Mills shook hands. "Glad to see you," he said. "I'd be
glad to see _anybody_, so don't get flattered. I've been five days alone
in the woods, cuttin' out fallen trees from the trail. Last winter was a
bad one."
"I s'pose there's a lot of snow here in winter," said Joe, as he set
about making the coffee.
"Last winter there was ten feet on the level in the woods, and the drift
piled up against Many Glacier Hotel out there till all you could see was
the peak of the roof."
"What!" Joe cried. "Why, that's five stories high!"
"So was the drift," said Mills
"What a chance for skiing!" Joe sighed. "Say, I'd like to spend a winter
here."
"Don't let's talk about it," Mills suddenly said. "Makes me blue. The
winters are too darn lonely. I see Popgun looks fat, and you've been
groomin' him, too. Where'd you get the curry comb? _I_ don't own one."
"Made it," Joe answered, "by punching holes with a nail through a tin
box cover."
"Can you ride yet?"
"Well, I can get around, without having to eat off the mantelpiece at
night."
"Want a job?"
"Sure, if it's something I can do. You know, I'm a regular grafter now,
just living off Spider. What is it?"
"Cooking mostly. Tastes to me as if you could do that," the Ranger said,
as he took a sip of Joe's coffee, and a bite of the fried eggs and bacon
Joe had also cooked for him, as they talked.
"I can cook all right--I learned that in the Boy Scouts," Joe answered,
eagerly. "Is it for a party?"
"Yes, it's a special party--a couple o' congressmen and their wives and
families. The Park superintendent wants me to show 'em around the
circuit a bit--have to be nice to congressmen, because Congress
appropriates what little money we get to build trails with. All the camp
cooks are out on trips now, and I'm up against it unless you'll go
along."
"I'm your man!" Joe cried, eagerly.
"Well, you're as good as a man when it comes to coffee," Mills grinned.
"I'll get a guide to help out with the packing and the heavy work. We
start to-morrow morning, early. Be up here at seven."
"O.K.," cried Joe, with a salute, and hurried back to tell Tom the news.
Spider looked grave. "I dunno about it," said he. "You know what the doc
said about overworking. I dunno whether I'll let you go."
"But it won't be overworking," Joe cried. "Gee, I feel great now,
anyhow, and it's just cooking, and the Ranger's going to get a guide to
do the heavy packing, and I'll be on horseback all the time, and out in
the air, and, gosh, but it's a great chance to see the Park, and earn
some money to pay you back----"
"Oh, forget that!" said Tom. "What's your pay going to be?"
"Don't know--didn't stop to ask," Joe laughed.
"You're a great little business man, you are," Tom said. "Well, you can
try it this trip, if you'll come over now to the hotel and get weighed,
and have your temperature taken."
The hikers had gone for the day, and the camp was vacant, so the two
scouts went around to the hotel at once, and Joe climbed on the scales.
Tom set them at a hundred and thirty, but the weight did not drop. He
moved the indicator weight pound by pound till he reached a hundred and
thirty-nine, before he reached a balance.
"Gosh," cried Joe, "that's almost ten pounds I've put on since I left
little old Southmead!"
"Yes, and you haven't coughed for a week," Tom added. "You're on the
mend, all right, all right. But you got to stay so, and I dunno about
letting you go on this trip--it'll be hard work cooking for a whole lot
o' people."
"Aw, please!" Joe pleaded. "I feel great now, honest I do. Besides, it's
all out in the open air."
"Well, you can try it this once," Tom finally said. "But if you have any
fever, or have lost any weight, or are fagged, when you get back, or
have any signs of a cold, or cough, no more trips for you!"
"Yes, doctor," Joe answered, meekly.
They went back to the camp, and Joe spent the afternoon studying the
government topographical survey map of the Park he had bought at the
hotel, overhauling his personal equipment, and then, at the supply depot
of the Glacier Park Saddle Company, which furnishes the horses, tents,
guides, blankets, etc., for camping and horseback parties in the Park,
selecting what he wanted in the way of cooking utensils and provisions
for his party.
Mills said they would be out five days, and there were to be two men,
two women, two girls and a boy in the party, besides Mills, Joe and two
guides, for Mills had decided they'd need two. That made eleven people
in all, or a hundred and sixty-five individual meals. Joe began to
think, when he came to figure it out, that it was more of a job than it
looked at first, especially when all the stuff had to be packed on
horseback. He planned for canned soups, for coffee, tea and cocoa,
served with condensed milk, of course; for plenty of bacon; for two or
three meals of eggs, packed in a small crate; for two meals of beef
(which, of course, would not keep, and would have to be served the first
two days out); for pancakes and "saddle blankets" (a kind of pan-fried
cake served with syrup, the syrup coming in cans); for bread, of course,
if he had time to make any; and, finally, beans, sardines, crackers,
some canned vegetables, and jam, marmalade and canned peaches. All these
things could be carried easily, as they came in tins or jars. All that
was needed were the horses. He got everything ready to be packed in the
morning, and hurried back to camp to get Tom's supper. Tom was busy with
a big crowd of hikers, who had just arrived over Piegan Pass, and it was
late before the two boys sat down to their meal.
"I sort of hate to go now," Joe said. "I'll be seeing all the Park, and
you having to stick around here and make beds for the hikers. When I get
back, I'm going to ask Big Bertha to let me run the camp, while you have
a trip."
"_Yes_ you are!" Spider laughed. "You're going to rest a whole week
after you get back. You look tired already. Guess I won't let you go,
after all."
"I'd like to see you stop me!" Joe answered, as he took a third helping
of pancakes.
"Well, you eat like a well man, I must admit," said Spider, reaching for
what was left.
CHAPTER IX--Over Piegan Pass to St. Mary Lake, Underneath the Precipices
Promptly at seven, Joe was at the Ranger's cabin. He had already cooked
Tom's breakfast, and Tom was over at the camp, helping the hikers to get
theirs. The sun had long been up, and the day was clear and perfect. In
fact, there hadn't yet been a rainy day since the scouts reached the
Park. But Mills had told Joe to bring his rubber poncho, so he had it
with him. He was to ride Popgun, of course, and the Ranger and he put
their personal equipment of blankets, tent, extra clothing, ponchos,
axes, and the like, on the Ranger's packhorse, and started for the big
hotel.
"I've got hold of a good extra man," Mills said. "With so many skirts in
the party, we'll have a big pack-train, for they insist on sleeping out
instead of going to the chalets. I was over last night to see 'em."
"Where are we going to-day?" Joe asked.
"Piegan Pass," Mills answered, "and make camp to-night by the lake.
That's twenty-two miles. To-morrow we'll go to Gunsight Lake--that's
only seven, and it'll be all they'll want after to-day--and rest up, and
let 'em climb Blackfeet Glacier if they want to."
At the hotel the two cowboy guides, one of them not very much older than
Joe, were already on hand with the horses and Joe's equipment of stores,
and the cooking kit, and three tents, and innumerable blankets. It made
such a pile of stuff that you'd have thought it would need a regiment of
horses to carry it, but Mills and the two guides went about the task of
packing it on to the backs of five horses, and so well did they stow it
away, properly balanced on either side and made fast with ropes in
diamond hitches, that the horses didn't seem to mind it in the least,
though they looked more like camels than horses. It was eight o'clock
before this work was done, and by that time the tourists appeared, with
their dunnage bags, which had to be packed on two more horses.
Joe had never seen a congressman before, except once when he went to a
political rally and he could not help staring at the two men as they
approached, and wanting to laugh. Beside Mills and the two cowboys, they
looked so unfitted for this job of riding a horse over the high trails!
They looked about as unfit as the cowboys would have looked in Congress.
Both of them still wore long trousers and ordinary boots, though they
had bought themselves flannel shirts and soft hats at the hotel store,
and sweaters. Their wives were not very much better equipped, though
both of them had bought khaki divided riding skirts (for nobody is
allowed to ride a side saddle in the Park). Beside the two congressmen
and their wives, there were two girls about twenty, and a boy about
Joe's age. One of the girls was the daughter of Congressman Elkins of
New Jersey, the other two of Congressman Jones of Pennsylvania. All
three of the young people, Joe noted, were better equipped. The girls
had regular riding breeches and leather leggins, like a man's, and the
boy had khaki riding breeches and high boots.
As soon as their dunnage bags had been packed on two more horses, the
job of getting the women into their saddles began, and then getting the
stirrups adjusted right. The girls and young Jones were up and ready
long before their mothers were, and making uncomplimentary remarks.
"Say, ma," called young Jones, "if your horse bucks, grab his tail. That
always stops 'em."
"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 detour 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.)
As soon as Mills saw the packhorses appear, however, he gave the signal
to proceed, so Joe did not have time to look about much. The trail
crossed the meadow, the ground squirrels peeking out of their holes and
chattering angrily at the disturbance, and then turned left, and began
at once to climb, alongside of the great cliff of Gould Mountain. They
climbed beside a roaring brook, and Joe soon realized that they weren't
going up Gould at all, but up the side canyon to the east. They hadn't
gone a mile before this brook was far below them, and they looked across
the deep hole it had made to the towering cliffs of Gould. Gould is a
part of the Great Divide, and Joe could now see more plainly than ever
before the strata of the earth crust--layer on layer of different
colored stone, like the layers in a gigantic cake. All down the
precipices were coming waterfalls, from the snow-fields above, and Joe
and Val reckoned that one fall took a clean jump of twenty-five hundred
feet. They could hear the thunder of it, across the canyon, though it was
not nearly so loud as you might think, because most of the water turned
to mist before it reached the bottom.
Now the trail began to get into the region of switchbacks, and Joe could
see the horses of all the party strung out far ahead, and then suddenly
doubling on their tracks so Mills would pass almost over his head, and
speak to him as he went by. Before long, he saw Mills halt, where the
trail went close to a beautiful waterfall, and as he came up, he heard
the Ranger telling the party that it was Morning Eagle Falls.
"What a pretty name--it must be Indian, of course?" Miss Elkins said.
"Named for some Blackfeet chief, I suppose," Mills answered.
"Say, dad, what's the matter with you?" laughed the Jones boy. "Why
don't you christen it Congressman Peter W. Jones Falls? What's the use
of being in the House of Representatives if you can't name a dinky
little waterfall after yourself?"
"My boy, he's waiting till he reaches the biggest mountain in the Park,
to name that after himself," the other congressman said, while every one
laughed, and the procession started up again.
They were climbing an ever steeper trail, now, and the trees began to
grow smaller and smaller, while, looking back, Joe could see Grinnell
Meadow far below him and the great cliff of Gould shooting up out of it.
Ahead, they began to get into snow-fields, and then they crossed
timber-line, where the trees were twisted and bent and even laid over
flat by the wind, and sometimes an evergreen a foot thick would be only
eighteen inches tall, and then, for twenty feet, bend over and lie along
the ground like a vine, sheared by the wind. Beyond timber-line they
came into a wild, naked, desolate region of broken shale stone, with
tiny Alpine flowers growing in the crannies, snow-fields lying all
about, and to their right, quite near, the southern end of Gould
Mountain where it dropped down a little to the Continental Divide level,
to their left the bare stone pile summit of Mount Siyeh, which is over
ten thousand feet high. A few more steps, and they stood on top of the
pass, and looked over the rim, on the tumbled mountains to the south,
with the great blue and white pyramid of Jackson (ten thousand feet)
rising a dozen miles away or more, over what looked like a vast hole in
the earth.
"This is Piegan Pass," said Mills.
"Why Piegan--and why a pass?" one of the congressmen asked. "I thought a
pass was a place where you went between things, not up over their
backs."
The Ranger laughed. "You're only seven thousand feet up here," he said.
"That mountain to the east, Siyeh, is ten thousand."
"Why, it looks as if I could just walk across these stones and get to
the top of it in twenty minutes!" cried Bob Jones.
"Try it," said Mills, laconically. "We'll be having lunch down in the
pines below."
Joe thought of the story of the Englishman, and hoped Bob would try it.
"You haven't explained the Piegan," Miss Elkins said.
"Why, the Indians that owned this reservation were the Piegan tribe of
the Blackfeet," said Mills.
"Dear, dear, another lost opportunity for dad!" sighed the irrepressible
Bob.
The cavalcade now began the descent on the south side of the pass, with
the Divide on their right, across a canyon, and the trail itself dug out
of the vast shale slide which was the south wall of Siyeh. It was a
steep, narrow trail, nothing but loose shale, and the horses had to pick
their way slowly and carefully, while the riders had to lean well back
and brace in their stirrups to keep from sliding forward on the horse.
"Say, Mr. Mills," Joe heard Bob call, "has this horse of mine got strong
ears?"
"Why?" asked Mills.
"Nothing, only if he hasn't, I'm going to take a toboggan slide down his
nose."
"Try walking," Mills called back.
Joe saw Bob dismount, and as he was feeling saddle stiff, he got off his
horse, too, and led him down by the bridle. The poor packhorses had to
tread on the very outside edge of the trail, because if they didn't,
their packs would knock the wall on the inner side, and what kept them
from slipping off was hard to see.
The trail down seemed endless. Far below, Joe saw a party coming up,
looking about a quarter of a mile away.
"I suppose we'll meet 'em day after to-morrow," Bob said.
[Illustration: Trail up Piegan Pass Showing Continental Divide and Mt.
Gould]
As a matter of fact, it was half an hour before the two parties met.
They had to pass on this narrow path, and Mills, the two guides, and Joe
held the horses of their party while the ascending riders squeezed past,
and then led the packhorses, one by one, to a spot where they could make
room for another horse to get by. It seemed ticklish work to Joe, but
the horses were as calm about it as if they had been on level ground.
It was long after one o'clock when the nineteen horses of the procession
finally stepped off the last of the shale upon the green grass of a
little meadow, and then into a level strip of woods. With a yell, Mills
hit his horse, and went forward at a smart trot, everybody following,
even the weary packhorses. Out of the woods on the other side they
trotted into the most beautiful spot Joe had ever seen in all his life,
and when Miss Elkins cried, "Oh, is this Heaven?" he felt like saying,
"Me too!"--but remembered that, after all, he was only the cook, and
kept silent.
"This is Piegan Pines," said the Ranger. "All off for lunch."
He sprang from his saddle, and he and the forward guide helped the two
older women to dismount--and they certainly needed help.
"I can _never_ get back there again," wailed poor Mrs. Jones, as she
flopped down on the grass.
While the party were dismounting, Joe had just time for a quick look
about him. They were in a little meadow, maybe half a mile wide, with
towering rock walls on both sides, hung with snow-fields and a glacier
or two, and, behind, the great shale slide down which they had just
come. Only one side, to the south, was open--and there the meadow just
dropped off into space. Across the hole, far off and blue, was the great
blue mass of Mount Jackson, covered with snow, and the great white and
green slopes of Blackfeet Glacier, the largest in the Park. The meadow
was full of little limber pines, golden with millions of dog-tooth
violet bells, and criss-crossed with tiny ice-water brooks, running in
channels over the grass--made, of course, by melting snow on the cliffs
above.
"Golly," thought Joe, "if old Spider and I could only come and camp
here!"
But now Mills was telling him to get a quick, cold lunch, and he and the
other guide sprang for the packhorses, and got out what was needed,
while Mills made a camp-fire beside one of the brooks.
As Joe was making his preparations, he felt Miss Elkins standing beside
him, and looked up.
"Are you the cook?" she asked.
"I--I believe so," Joe stammered, getting red.
"You don't look very old to be a cook," said she. "Have you got lots and
lots to eat? I could devour a whole butcher shop, I think."
"Cold lunch," said Joe, grinning. "Ranger's orders."
"Oh, not a cold lunch! Mr. Mills--Mr. Mills--cook says you say a cold
lunch. You didn't say that, did you?"
"Sure, ice water and a cracker," the Ranger grinned. "Can't stop to
cook."
"Oh, please, just coffee--mother will _never_ get back on her horse
without a cup of coffee."
"I'll never get back without _two_ cups," groaned Mrs. Jones.
"Well, Joe, make 'em coffee," said Mills, with a wink at Joe, who had
been intending to make coffee all the time.
He filled his kettle at the little brook, and while the coffee was
boiling, opened a small can of sardines apiece, some boxes of crackers,
a can of beans, and two or three jars of jam. For the jam, he carefully
whittled some dead pine limbs into rough spoons, to save dish washing,
and sweetened the coffee, when ready, in the pot, for the same purpose.
By the time he had this very simple lunch spread out on a bit of level
ground, with no plates or spoons except for the beans, which he had
heated while the coffee was boiling, the party had scattered, all but
Val, the young cowboy.
"Ready?" Val asked.
"All ready."
Val picked up a piece of wood and a frying-pan, which lay on the opened
pack. Pounding the pan with the stick like a drum, he yelled,
"Come and get it!"
"That's the word that brings 'em in these parts," he added to Joe.
It did.
"That's the most eloquent speech I ever heard!" exclaimed Mr. Jones.
In about one minute, they were all gathered around the fire. Val passed
the food and Joe poured the coffee.
"Say, what do you take these sardines out with?" demanded Mrs. Jones.
"Fingers were made before forks, mother darling," said Bob. "See--watch
your little son."
He picked up a sardine by the tail, and dropped the whole of it into his
mouth.
"Well, I must say, I'd like a fork----" she began, and Joe turned red,
for he had forgotten the forks for the sardines.
But Miss Elkins spoke up before Mrs. Jones could finish.
"Cook hasn't time to wash dishes this noon," she said. "We've got to
make camp before dark. Besides, we're roughing it. I think it's great!"
and she, too, picked a sardine out of her tin by the tail, and dropped
it upon a cracker.
Joe cast her a grateful glance, and she smiled at him sweetly. He
decided then and there, as he put it to himself, that she was "all to
the good."
Meantime Mrs. Elkins, her mother, was watching Val, with fascinated
eyes.
"What _are_ you looking at, mother?" her daughter demanded. Bob's eyes
followed hers, and he gave a hoot of glee.
"A Charlie Chaplin sandwich!" he cried.
Then everybody looked at Val, who was grinning amiably, as he sat on a
fallen log, making himself a sandwich, between two crackers, of the
entire bill of fare--sardines, jam, and baked beans. This he consumed in
exactly three bites, and proceeded to concoct another one.
"Well," he said, as he made this second, "you mix 'em all inside, don't
you? Why not first? Saves time."
"Ugh!" said Mrs. Jones. "I'm afraid I wasn't born to rough it."
"Efficiency, I call it," said her husband. "Why not, as he says. Think
I'll try it."
"Me, too," said Bob.
"Me, too."
"Me, too," from each of the girls. They all did try it--once--much to
Mrs. Jones' disgust.
It did not take long to clean out the sardine tins and the jam jars.
Then Joe produced a piece of sweet chocolate apiece, while the girls
called him "a darling thing," and the congressmen lit their cigars and
lay back on the grass, while Joe and Val packed up again.
"You go along right away, with the pack-train," said Mills to them, "and
when you reach the lake, turn toward Sun Camp, till you come to the
point of land. Start making camp by that. We'll come slower."
So Joe had to climb back on Popgun--reluctantly, for he hated to leave
this beautiful upland meadow, and led the way down the trail, with the
eight packhorses behind him, and Val bringing up the rear. Of course, he
and Val were thus so far apart they could not talk, and with nothing in
front of him, it seemed almost as if he were alone, plunging into the
unknown wilderness.
The trail immediately fell over the edge of the meadow, into timber, and
began to descend steeply, the woods growing more dense and the trees
much larger as the trail dropped down, till, after a mile or two, they
were in a heavy forest of big fir trees. As they neared the bottom land,
the footing got heavy, too, and finally the trail was mostly black mud.
They plodded through this for a mile or more, and then, through the
great tree trunks, Joe began to see light, and, high up, the red and
white and gray tops of mountains, and finally, after they had turned to
the left by a rushing stream, and followed down it a ways, he saw the
dancing waters of a green lake. A short distance now, and they were
beside this lake. It was, Joe knew, St. Mary Lake, the upper end of the
same lake he had seen on the trip in from the railroad on the motor bus.
As he came out on an open headland on the shore, he could not help
pulling up his horse, and looking at it. Val trotted up beside him.
"Some pond, eh?" said the cowboy. "I like this puddle. Good fish in it,
too."
But Joe was not thinking of fish then. He was thinking--well, he could
not have told you what he was thinking; maybe he was just feeling. It
was all so huge, and awe-inspiring, and yet so beautiful! The lake was
two miles wide, he fancied, and went out of sight around a headland to
the east. To the west, it seemed to run right up into a big canyon that
ended bang against Blackfeet Glacier, Mount Jackson, and the sawtooth
peaks of the Great Divide. Directly opposite, two huge rock pyramids
came sheer down into the water.
"Those are Red Eagle and Little Chief Mountains," said Val. "See that
house over on the one little island? That's where the president of the
Great Northern Railroad lives in summer. Come on, though, we can't look
at the pretty pictures. We've got to get tents up for the others. She
doesn't like to rough it, Mrs. Jones don't. Say, I bet she asks you to
heat her curling irons to-night."
Joe laughed.
"Why didn't you remind me of the forks?" said he. "I'm green, you know,
and get rattled."
"Forks, what for? Let her use her pickers. It'll do her good," said Val.
Joe laughed again. Val was just what he wanted a cowboy to be--jolly,
reckless, without any reverence for any one or anything. He liked him
especially because when it came to doing any job, he went right at it
cheerfully and did it.
They now trotted east, along the border of the lake, directly in front
of them towering up the huge and beautifully shaped pinkish-gray pyramid
of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. After a mile or so, Val called out for Joe
to turn off the trail, and he obeyed, going down through the woods to a
long spit of rocks and earth and little trees which had been pushed out
into the lake by a roaring brook, which now flowed through the middle of
it. Here they dismounted and unloaded the horses, which Val led back to
the trail, and then took somewhere up the slopes to their night feeding.
Meanwhile Joe set about making camp. He first picked out a good place
for the fire pit, and built that. He got out what he was going to need
for supper, and then set about collecting dead wood for his fire. He did
not have to go far, either, for the whole rocky beach of the lake was
lined with driftwood, and he cut up a good supply, made a fire, and put
on two kettles of water to boil, one with some of the beef in it for a
stew, one for soup. Then he went at the task of setting up the tent the
Ranger had packed, in which he and Mills would sleep, and in which he
would keep his provisions.
He had hardly finished, and had the stuff stowed into it, when up the
trail he heard voices, and a moment later the party came in sight. They
were mostly silent now--only Bob and the girls were doing any talking.
Their mothers were hanging forward over the horns of their saddles,
thoroughly tired out, and the two congressmen looked nearly as fagged as
the women.
"Can I help?" Joe asked the Ranger, after the party had dismounted, and
the older people had flopped on the ground.
"No, get supper as soon as you can, that's all. Dick and I will pitch
the tents. Where's Val?"
"He took the horses somewhere."
"Good. He can take these, too, when he gets back. That'll please him a
whole lot! Why didn't he wait till he had the whole bunch?"
Joe looked quickly at Mills' face, for he had never seen the Ranger
cross before.
Mills managed a grin, when he saw the look. "Yes, I got a grouch," he
said, in a low tone. "It's that Jones woman. You'd think she wanted a
twin-six limousine to bring her over Piegan Pass! What'll you take to
throw her in the lake?"
"Wait for Val. He'll do it for nothing," Joe laughed. "She'll feel
better soon. I'm goin' to give her two forks."
Joe went back to his preparations for supper, keeping the fire roaring
under his stew to hasten the cooking, and mixing up a batter of flour,
condensed milk, one of his precious eggs, and some baking powder, for
cakes. The Ranger and Dick, the other guide, were busy with the tents,
one for the three men, and two smaller ones for the four women. The
women's tents had little folding cot beds, but the men's did not, and
Mills, with a wink at Joe, gave Bob and the two congressmen axes, and
told them to go cut themselves boughs to sleep on, from a big evergreen
which had blown over. Meanwhile, the two girls came over to Joe's fire,
and watched him work.
They sniffed at the kettle of stew.
"Are we going to have _meat_, really, truly meat, for dinner, Cookie?"
asked Miss Jones.
"Alice, if you call him Cookie, he'll poison you, won't you--Joe?" said
Miss Elkins.
Joe looked up and met her twinkling eyes. "Sure," he said. "I'll put a
Charlie Chaplin sandwich in it."
"Mercy, Mr. Cook, Sir Cook, My Lord Cook, Reverend Cook!" cried Alice.
"All right, s'long as you don't call me Dr. Cook," said Joe, peeping in
the stew kettle to see how it was coming along.
"Here, no flirting with the cook," Mills called out. "You girls have got
to make the beds."
"All right," laughed Lucy Elkins. (Joe thought to himself that Lucy was
a nice name.) "Where are the sheets and pillow-cases?"
"You'll find 'em in the linen closet, next door beyond the bathroom,"
Mills grinned.
Then she and Alice grabbed armfuls of blankets from the packs, and
disappeared into the tents.
Meantime Val arrived, and the Ranger asked him why he didn't wait and
drive all the horses up together.
"'Cause I'm a natural born mut, and didn't think of it," said Val.
The Ranger growled, and turned away. "Because he'd rather do that than
pitch tents," he muttered. "All cowboys are lazy."
The two weary congressmen and Bob now reappeared, with armfuls of
evergreen boughs, and the Ranger went to show them how to lay their
beds. The sun was getting well down toward the tops of the peaks on the
Great Divide to the west. Already it was getting colder, and the women
had put on their sweaters. The green waters of the lake were lap-lapping
against the shore, and the smell of Joe's stew was rising with the smoke
of the fire. When he saw it was about done, he made a big pot of coffee,
then opened his cans of soup, and poured them into the other kettle of
boiling water, and mixed it to the right consistency. As soon as this
was ready, and Val appeared down from the woods above, he pounded a
frying-pan and yelled,
"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!"
"Joe, I believe you're a poet," Lucy said.
"Well, if your poetry is as good as your coffee, Shakespeare will have
to watch out," Alice laughed.
Joe turned red again, and nearly dropped his stack of plates.
When he had the dishes washed and the fire-wood ready for morning, he
found that the Ranger had built a big camp-fire in front of the tents,
and placed some logs about it, to lean against, while sitting on the
ground. Everybody was sitting in a ring, glad of the warmth now that the
cold night chill was falling from the peaks--all but the two cowboys,
who had disappeared.
"They've gone to the Sun Camp chalets, half a mile down the trail," said
Mills, when somebody asked where they were.
"And where's Joe?" said Lucy. "Oh, there he is. Come on in the house,
Joe, where it's warm. Mr. Mills is going to tell us a bedtime story."
She made room for Joe to sit beside her, and he sank down, weary and
sore, for they had ridden twenty-two miles that day, and he had cooked
for eleven hungry people.
"Now Mr. Mills--begin!" she commanded.
The poor Ranger turned red in his turn.
"Gosh," he said, "I couldn't tell a story. I don't know any stories."
"Oh, yes you do--you must."
"Tell us a bear story." cried Bob. "And tell it quick, or dad'll be
telling one of those he gets off in after dinner speeches, and we'll all
be asleep."
"Bob, I'm too sore and tired to thrash you," laughed the congressman.
"But you're never too tired to tell a story, dad. Hurry, Mr. Mills, I
can see one coming now!"
"If I had a child like that, I'd--I'd----" Mr. Elkins began.
"You'd send him to Congress to listen to all the speeches there for
punishment," chortled the irrepressible Bob. "Please, Mr. Mills, a bear
story."
"Yes, a bear story!"--from the men.
"A _grizzly_ bear story!"--from Alice. "A _great_, BIG grizzly bear
story!"--from Lucy. "And put in the middle-sized bear, and the little
weeny bear, too, if you want to."
The Ranger laughed. "Well," he said, "I can tell you a bear and a lion
story, if that'll do."
He threw another driftwood log on the fire, and began.
CHAPTER X--The Ranger Tells a Grizzly Bear Story Before the Camp-Fire
"The first thing you want to remember about old Mr. Silver Tip," said
the Ranger, "is that he's a good deal like a lot o' big, strong men,
he's too powerful to be scrappy. You hear a lot o' stories about
grizzlies bein' terrible fighters, and they sure can fight when they're
cornered, or when old mother bear thinks her cubs are in danger. But if
a silver tip can possibly get away, he gets. That's not because he's
afraid, either, of anything on earth except a high power rifle. It's
because he ain't lookin' for trouble. Mr. Silver Tip is afraid of a
rifle, all right, and he's about the smartest of all animals in keeping
away from it, too. But there's nothing else he's afraid of, and before
man came into these mountains to shoot him, he just wandered around
here, the king pin, and nobody bothered him a bit, no sir."
"But don't grizzlies have to fight to kill anything as big as a moose?"
asked Bob.
"They don't kill anything as big as a moose," the Ranger said. "Oh, once
in a blue moon an old bear will go wrong, and take to killing cattle.
Down in Wyoming there was a silver tip used to kill cattle, and two
hundred men and dogs hunted him a month, and never did get him. But
mostly they live on roots and berries and mice and ground squirrels and
dead birds and animal carcases something else has killed. Why, I've seen
a grizzly digging out a ground squirrel in the early spring, just after
he'd come out of his winter nest, not far from my cabin, and a lot of
sheep, down there to get the early grass, walking right up close to him
to see what he was up to. When they got too close--sheep are kind o'
curious, like kids and women--he just _woufed_ at 'em, to drive 'em off.
They weren't afraid of him eatin' 'em, though, at all, and he could have
cleaned out the flock with about two bites.
"Well, this is just to show you how little fear Mr. Silver Tip has that
anything but a man can do him any harm, or will dare try it. I was
hunting once over west of the Flathead River, in bear country, and I had
a dead horse out in a clearing for bait. Up in a tree on the edge of the
clearing I'd built myself a kind of blind, where I could watch. You see,
most bears can climb trees, but the grizzly can't, so when one comes
after you, Bob, you just beat it up the nearest trunk."
"Thanks for the tip--the silver tip, as you might say," the boy laughed.
"Well," Mills went on, "by 'n' by along into the clearing come two
lions, long, lean, hungry lookin', sneaky beasts they are, too--I hate
'em--and they fell to on the carcase, and began to eat. Thinks I, I'd
wait and see what happened, instead of killin' 'em and maybe scarin' off
the bear with the shots so's he'd never come back. Sure enough, the old
boy came galumphing along presently, and went up on his hind legs when
he saw the lions at his festal board, as you might say. Then he dropped
down again, and just walked right up, stuck his big shoulders in between
the two lions, shovin' 'em apart, and began to eat."
"That's no way to treat a lion," said Lucy.
"No, specially as one of 'em was a lady lion," Mills laughed. "But
that's what old Silver Tip did. The lions naturally didn't like it, and
one of 'em snarled, and up with his paw and fetched the bear a nasty
swipe. Then I expected to see trouble.
"But what do you think the old bear did? He just kind of side-cut with
one of his big paws and caught that lion a blow that sent him spinning
head over tail twenty feet down the slope. Then he went right on eating.
He didn't look at the other lion, he didn't even look around to see what
the first one was goin' to do. 'Peared as if he was quite certain what
they'd both do, and they done it. They both took a quick sneak into the
woods, and left Mr. Silver Tip to his feast. You couldn't have brushed
off a mosquito more calmly. I says to myself then that it showed how
sure of himself the grizzly is--he's king of the forest, all right."
"And did you shoot him after that?" Lucy asked.
"Sure I shot him."
"I think you were real horrid," she said.
"Maybe," Mills answered. "But I'm still wearin' his skin in winter."
"How many shots did it take?" asked one of the congressmen. "I've always
heard you have to pump a grizzly full of lead, and then use a knife to
defend yourself, after your last shell is emptied."
"The feller that told you that was a bum shot," said the Ranger.
"'Course there are a lot of bum shots come out here huntin'. One bullet,
in the brain, the upper part of the heart, or the right place in the
spine, will drop a silver tip like a sack o' grain. You've got to know
where to hit, and you've got to hit there, naturally. Trouble is, green
hunters get scared or rattled, and don't aim right, and half the time
when they think they're plugging the bear they're really peppering the
rocks behind him. I wouldn't want to hunt 'em myself with a single shot
rifle, but I could if I had to. A city chap in one of our parties once,
over in the Blackfeet forest, smashed all four of a bear's legs with
bullets, and then the bear, tryin' to get away, fell into a stream and
drowned to death. Our cook asked the feller why he didn't chuck him in
to start with, and save shells."
"When you going to show us a bear?" Bob demanded.
"Mercy, I do hope it isn't very soon!" cried Bob's mother. "I'm sure _I_
don't want to meet one. I don't suppose there are any in the Park any
more."
"Oh, yes, more 'n ever," said the Ranger, managing a secret wink to Joe.
"Why, there was two women from Boston once, sitting in broad day on the
steep cut bank of a stream, and they heard crashings in the bush, and
looked back and seen a big grizzly coming right toward 'em, and they
yelled like Comanches and fell right down the bank into the water, and
waded across up to their necks and beat it back to camp."
"Better stick close to brave little Bobbie, ma," laughed her son. "I
won't let the naughty big bear bite you. But when are you going to show
me one, Mr. Mills?"
"Day after to-morrow," said the Ranger.
Joe pricked up his ears. It sounded as if Mills meant it.
"Is that a threat or a promise?" Lucy asked.
"Promise for Bob, a threat for Mrs. Jones, I guess," said the Ranger,
rising from the ground, and adding, "Who's ready for bed?"
"Better ask who isn't," somebody laughed.
Joe went as far out on the rocky spit into the lake as he could get; he
could see the dying camp-fire gleaming red back under the trees; and all
around him, over the dim, starlit water, rose the majestic mountains,
great walls of shadow rearing up half-way to the top of the sky. It was
a still, solemn scene, and he felt very small as he crouched by the lake
and cleaned his teeth in water that was almost as cold as ice.
When he got back to camp every one was abed, and he crawled into the
tent with Mills and wrapped himself up in his blankets, with only his
poncho for a mattress, and almost before he had got his body fitted into
the unevennesses of the ground he was fast asleep.
CHAPTER XI--To Gunsight Lake, and Joe Falls Into a Crevasse on
Blackfeet Glacier
The Ranger was the first up in the morning. He gave Joe a shake by the
shoulder, and Joe half opened one sleepy eye and said, "Aw, ma, it ain't
time to get up yet."
Then he heard Mills chuckle, and he realized where he was. He looked at
his watch, and saw that it was almost six. Outside, it was broad
daylight, and the sun was flooding up the lake.
Joe sat up and threw back the blankets. "Golly, I'm sore and stiff," he
said, rubbing himself. "Been sleeping on a cot, and I'm soft, I guess."
"You also did twenty-two miles yesterday," Mills remarked. "Well, I
haven't told 'em yet, but we're going to do only seven to-day, and then
have a side trip for the young folks. Guess Mother Jones will want to
stay in camp and help you get supper."
"She'd better try!" cried Joe, springing up at the word "supper," for it
reminded him that it was his job to get breakfast. He had a quick wash
in the brook which ran past the camp, and set about making some biscuit,
bacon and eggs, coffee and flapjacks. His fire was going merrily, and in
its heat he had begun to get warm (for the night chill was still in the
air, and you could almost see your breath), when he saw Congressman
Elkins poking a sleepy face out of the men's tent flap, with his hair
all tousled, and his body bent half double. He spied the fire, and made
a hobble for it.
"Say, Joe, let me get some of that heat, will you?" he said.
"Sure," Joe laughed. "Didn't you have blankets enough?"
"I had five--ought to be enough, in the third week of July, you'd think.
But I shivered all night, and every time I shivered a new branch in our
wonderful bough bed found a fresh spot on my anatomy to puncture. I'm
beginning to think Mrs. Jones is right about this roughing it stuff."
"No, sir, she isn't," Joe answered, as he set his batter of biscuit over
the fire. "Only you have to learn how to do it, and get hardened to it a
bit, too. How'd you have the blankets?"
"How'd I have 'em? Over me, of course."
"That's the trouble," said Joe. "The secret of sleeping warm is to have
'em _under_ you, too. That's where as much cold comes as from above,
even in a bed. You roll yourself up in 'em to-night and see if you're
not warm."
"Where'd you learn all this?" the congressman asked. "You look pretty
young to be a camp cook. Live around here?"
"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,
"Come and get it!"
That is a call in Glacier Park no one has to hear a second time. Even
Mrs. Jones perked up, and stopped complaining about how cold she was,
and how she hated to clean her teeth in ice water, and how she missed
her morning bath, and silenced her own tongue with a bite of bacon that
was more nourishing than ladylike in size. The breakfast disappeared in
double quick time, and Val went up the hill for the horses, while Mills
and Dick began to strike the tents and arrange the packs, and Joe
cleaned his dishes and packed his provisions.
At half-past eight, the party was in the saddle again, Mills at the
head, and started up the trail, along the lake shore, toward the
gleaming white field of Blackfeet Glacier and the red, snow-spangled
cone of Mount Jackson.
"Where are we bound to-day?" some one asked.
"Only seven miles, to Gunsight Lake," the Ranger answered. "I thought
maybe you'd like an easy stage to-day, and this afternoon those that
wanted to could go up on the glacier."
"The man is almost intelligent!" Mrs. Jones exclaimed. "Only seven
miles--that sounds more reasonable to me."
They were seven easy miles, too, up a streamside by an easy grade, a
good deal of the way through tall timber, and past a beaver dam, the
first one Joe had ever seen. It was made of small logs, twigs and
grasses, all matted together, and plastered neatly and tightly with mud,
and must have been a hundred feet long and perhaps three feet high, so
that a considerable little pond had backed up behind it, in which,
rising above the water, were the huts, which looked like larger and
better built muskrat huts. Joe pulled down his horse to a slow walk as
he passed, and saw the little canals the beavers had made, leading from
the bed of the stream back into the willow and aspen swamp. He figured
out that the chief reason the beavers build dams is so they can flood
such a grove of young willows, aspens, etc., and float out the tiny logs
they cut (the young shoots, with tender bark), to their houses, where
they store them for winter food. Later he asked Mills, and found he was
right. When the beavers can find deep water, with food trees right on
the bank, they will not bother to make dams.
Joe lingered till Val yelled at him to "get a move on," hoping he might
see one of the little animals at work, but the beaver works mostly at
night when he has to be above water, and not one was now to be seen.
It was a short, easy trip to Gunsight Lake, and they reached the open
meadow at its foot by eleven o'clock. The lake, a smallish one, lay at
the bottom of a great horseshoe amphitheatre. If you will imagine the
Harvard stadium two or three miles long instead of two or three hundred
yards, with sides almost precipitous and three thousand feet high, and a
green lake where the football gridiron is, you have a picture of
Gunsight. The closed end of the horseshoe was the Divide, and that was
where the Gunsight Pass lay, over which they would climb to-morrow. The
north side was Fusillade Mountain, the south side was the great shoulder
of Mount Jackson (the summit being invisible from this point). The
meadow where they were to camp was just out at the open end, where they
could see around the shoulder of Jackson to the glittering field of
Blackfeet Glacier, the largest in the Park, hung on the upper slopes of
the Divide, to the southwest, and where, behind them, rose the huge
cliffs of Citadel Mountain, which is exactly like old Fort Sumter or the
old fort on Governor's Island, enlarged to the "_nth_" power. (If you
don't know what "enlarged to the _nth_ power" means, it's either because
you have not studied your algebra, or have not reached algebra yet.) The
floor of the meadow was full of wild flowers, especially the great, tall
white spikes of the Indian basket grass, and full, too, of low balsams
and pines.
Close to the shore of the lake lay a big pile of lumber, old, twisted
iron beds, half a cook-stove, and the like.
"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.
"I do!" from Lucy.
"I do!" from Alice.
"I do, if I can go on horseback," from Mr. Elkins.
"Same as Elkins," from Mr. Jones.
"I want to sit still," from Mrs. Jones.
"I couldn't leave Mrs. Jones all alone," from Mrs. Elkins.
"You haven't spoken, Joe," said Lucy.
Poor Joe--how he wanted to climb up and see a real glacier! But he
smiled bravely and cheerfully.
"I shall have to stay and get dinner," he answered.
"Oh, that's too bad! I just _know_ you're dying to see the glacier. Mr.
Mills, wouldn't we be back in time for Joe to get dinner, if he went?"
"Well, we might be, if dinner was a bit late, and you didn't have a
roast turkey," the Ranger said.
"Well, I move we have late dinner, and take Joe along. All in favor, say
aye."
Bob and Alice yelled "Aye!" and Mr. Elkins said, "Jones and I are
paired, so it's a vote."
Joe tried to say some word of thanks to Lucy, but he couldn't manage it.
Besides, he had no time, for Mrs. Jones broke in:
"Well, I'd like to know if you expect Mrs. Elkins and me to stay here
all alone?"
"You might be getting the dinner, Martha," her husband grinned.
"Val will stay in camp," Mills said. "He's fed up on glaciers, anyhow,
ain't you, Val?"
The young cowboy nodded. "You can have 'em all," he said, "and welcome."
So Joe found himself in the small party headed for Blackfeet Glacier, as
soon as he had put his stew to simmer over a small fire, which Val
promised to keep going. Mills took three of the strongest ropes from the
packs, and they set off up the steep, rough trail climbing the shoulder
of Jackson. They soon had a superb view below them, first of the meadow,
with their own tents like white dots in it, and then back down the canyon
to St. Mary Lake, and the great pink and gray pyramid of
Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But it was not long before every one stopped
looking at the view, and paid entire attention to the trail. This was a
side trail, not one of the regular tourist highways, and it was not
built for comfort. It was tremendously steep, and very rough, more like
a flight of high, irregular stone steps than a path.
"Oh, I think this is terrible on the poor horses!" Lucy said, as her
horse scrambled up a rock, and she had to cling to his mane to stick on
the saddle.
"Get out and walk, then," Mills called back. "Grab hold of your horse's
tail, and let him pull you up."
"Say, what you giving us?" said Bob. "Think I want to go down the hill
again backwards?"
Mills laughed. "Think these horses are mules?" he answered. "See, this
is the way."
He got off his horse, grabbed it by the tail, and to everybody's
surprised amusement, the horse started up, with the Ranger scrambling
behind him, half climbing, half being pulled along.
Every one else got off, too, and in single file, each person clinging to
his horse's tail, they began the ascent again. The horses, being
considerably longer legged than men, climbed faster up the high steps
than a man could do alone, but with the horse's tail to hang on to, you
could manage to keep up. Everybody laughed at first, yelling at one
another, but in three minutes the yells had ceased, and in five, the
laughter. No one had any breath left for that. If Joe had thought, he
probably would have been frightened, for he was certainly disobeying the
doctor, but he was having too good a time to remember doctors, and as
even the lack of breath did not make him cough, he had nothing to remind
him. Panting, covered with perspiration, the two congressmen were about
ready to quit. They presently reached a more level place, a high upland
meadow covered with flowers, and mounting again rode up and across this,
and came at last near the lower edge of a great snow-field, which
stretched away southward for three miles, broken here and there by
peninsulas and islands of rock, and stretched upward clear to the summit
of the Divide over their heads, at an angle of about forty-five degrees
at first, but much steeper near the top.
"The biggest glacier in the Park," said Mills.
"Where?" said Mr. Elkins. "All I see is snow."
"I know it--too bad, but we had so much snow last winter it's not melted
off yet. But take my word for it, that's all ice underneath."
"Hooray, let's climb out on it!" Bob shouted.
"Not for me--I've climbed enough to-day," his father said, still
puffing.
It ended with the two congressmen resting in the meadow, while Mills,
Dick the guide, Joe, the girls, and Bob, climbed up some way over the
rocks without any trail, and reached at length a place where the vast
snow-field seemed to be sliding down past them, like a huge, silent
river. Of course, it did not move, but it gave that illusion.
"What a place to ski!" said Joe.
"Wow!" yelled Bob, "you bet! You'd get some jump at the bottom, too."
Mills grinned. "About as far as whichever place you're going to when you
die," he said, as he began to uncoil his three ropes, fastening them
together.
"What's the big idea?" asked Bob. "That snow's soft; you wouldn't slip
in that."
And, to prove it, he started down the rocks, and out on to the
snow-covered glacier.
Mills suddenly spoke with a sharp note Joe had never heard him use.
"Come back here!" he said.
Bob came.
"Now, Joe," he said, "you go first on the rope, because you've got
spikes in your shoes. We've got to look out for crevasses. Sound your
footing when it looks suspicious. We'd need Alpine stocks to go far."
He fastened one end under Joe's arms.
"You next, Dick, to brace if Joe goes under. Then the rest of you, and
I'll be the rear anchor."
He made the rope fast around Dick, twenty feet behind Joe, then told Bob
and the girls to hold it fast at equal intervals, and fastened the rear
end around his own waist
"Now, Joe, let her go," he said.
Joe went down the rocks, and out on the great snow-field, tilted like
the roof of a house. It was soft, as Bob had said, but not like ordinary
soft snow. It was more like walking in cold, wet, rock salt, and the
footing was anything but sure. Joe went cautiously, slowly climbing
upward and outward at the same time, and as he looked below him, down
that smooth, glistening, white slope, and realized that if he once got
started sliding he would probably go half a mile and shoot off the lower
edge into space, he felt his heart, for a minute, go down somewhere into
his boots. So he looked up, instead of downward, and felt better.
Everything went well for some hundreds of yards, and the whole party, on
their rope, were well out on the great snow-field, when Joe saw just
ahead of him a very slight depression in the snow. Bracing with his
right foot, he put his left forward, and hit this depression smartly. It
caved in! He tried to spring back, yelling to Dick to brace, but his
right foot, with nothing but snow for the spikes to hold in, slipped,
and he felt himself going down. He had no time to think, only just a
terrible flash in his brain of accidents he had read about to Alpine
climbers, before the rope caught him under the armpits with a cruel
yank; he hung for a minute surrounded by the wet, cold snow which was
falling down his neck, and then he felt himself being tugged up again by
Dick.
Mills had come up, bringing the rope around Bob and the girls in a loop,
by the time Dick had him out.
"Hurt?" he asked.
Joe was poking snow out of his neck, and loosening the grip of the rope
under his arms.
"I--I guess not!" he panted. "Gee, that gave me some surprise, though. I
thought something was coming, and tested it with one foot, but the other
slipped."
"We ought to have ice axes," Mills said. "The snow's getting too thin.
Back's the word."
Joe looked around at the rest of the party, and saw that Lucy and Alice
had turned deadly pale, and even Bob was looking sober.
"Are you sure you aren't hurt, Joe?" Lucy asked.
"I'll get dinner, O.K.," Joe answered.
Meanwhile Mills had approached the hole where Joe went under, and called
the rest to come and look, one by one, while he and Dick braced the
rope.
Joe looked, too. His fall had collapsed a snow bridge over a crevasse,
and through the hole, which was six feet wide or more, they could see
down through a layer of snow into what looked like a bottomless slit
between walls of dirty green ice. A cold, damp, chilling breath came up
from the hole, and far below they could hear water running.
"Now you get the big idea, Bob, eh?" said Mills. "See why we had the
rope?"
"Yes, and I bet old cookie's glad it was a strong one," Bob replied.
"Say, I wish it had been me'd been ahead!"
"Oh, do you?" the Ranger laughed. "Want to be lowered down?"
"Oh, no--Mr. Mills!" Alice cried.
"Cheer up, he wouldn't let me," Mills grinned. "Besides, he's too fat
and heavy to pull up again."
"If a feller fell down there, and they didn't get him up, and he froze
into the ice, would he come out some time at the bottom of the glacier?"
Bob asked.
"I guess he would," said Mills, "but his widow might get tired waiting
and marry again."
"Mr. Mills, you're perfectly awful" said Lucy, with a shudder. "Take us
back from this horrid place."
[Illustration: Crevasse in Blackfeet Glacier]
They went back carefully in their own tracks, and rejoined the
congressmen, who, it seemed, had climbed where they could watch, and had
seen the whole thing from a distance. There was much excited talk about
Joe's experience all the way down (on the down trip they led their
horses over the steep part, needing no help on the descent), and Joe,
sore as he was under the arms and rather shaky from the shock, began to
feel like quite a hero. In fact, by the time they reached the level
meadows at camp, it did not seem terrible at all, and every one had
begun to enjoy it.
"Except me," said Lucy. "I shall dream all night of the way poor Joe's
head went suddenly out of sight, and I saw Dick bracing on that rope and
wondered if it would hold!"
"The moral is," said her father, "have a good rope."
"I should say the moral was, don't climb in foolish places," Mrs. Jones
declared, for the two women had of course been told the story at once.
"Gee, ma," Bob declared, "if everybody was like you, we wouldn't know
there were any Rocky Mountains. Somebody's got to take a chance!"
Mills had said nothing. Now he spoke, in his brief, quiet way.
"It was a sound rope. Nobody took a chance," he said. "We don't let 'em
in the Park."
There did not seem to be any reply to this. The girls went into their
tent to rest, Joe changed his wet boots--which were soaked with the
snow--and his wet shirt, and set busily about getting dinner. After all,
he was the cook, and there was no further time for being a hero.
CHAPTER XII--Over Gunsight to Lake McDonald, and Joe and Bob See a
Grizzly at Close Range
There was no story telling that night. Dinner was late, and afterwards
the dusk came earlier up here under the shadows of the great cliffs, and
every one except the two women was glad enough to crawl in early. Joe
was gladdest of all. He had to confess that he was tired, as well as
sore--and now he realized that he had disobeyed all orders not to climb
and take strenuous exercise. But he felt of his head, as his mother used
to do, and could detect no fever, and he had not coughed once, so he did
not worry enough to keep himself awake more than one minute and a
quarter. In the morning, he was awake almost as soon as the Ranger, and
sat up feeling fine. Lucy was the next up, as usual, and once more her
cheerful self. She gathered fresh wild flowers--a great bunch of yellow
columbine and blue false forget-me-nots, for the "table," while Joe was
cooking, and asked him how he felt, and sang softly to herself, and then
asked him again if the fresh, clear, morning air way up here in these
high mountains was not the most wonderful thing in the world.
"It's medicine to me, all right," Joe answered, looking up and watching
the sun come over the rock bastions of Citadel and turn to pink and gold
the snow-fields on Fusillade. "Gee, I think mountains--big
mountains--are just the best ever!"
"The best ever, that's what they are, Joe, and you're going back East so
big and strong that your own mother won't know you. You must write to me
and tell me about it, won't you?"
"You bet I will," Joe replied, turning red over his fire. It certainly
was almost like being home to have some one like Lucy Elkins be so
interested in him, and kindly and sweet. The fire was very smoky, and
got into Joe's eyes, and he had to wipe them--but Lucy did not see, or,
if she did, she pretended not to.
"Well," said Mills, after breakfast, "everybody pack. We've got a long
day ahead of us, if we stop any time to see the sights."
"And where are we going?" somebody asked.
"Over Gunsight Pass, and down to Lake McDonald," the Ranger answered,
pointing up to the Great Divide at the head of Gunsight Lake.
"Do you mean to tell me we are going over that place?" demanded Mrs.
Jones.
"Why not?" said Mills.
"Why not? Well, I'm not one of these Rocky Mountain goats I hear about."
"Your horse is," the Ranger laughed.
As soon as camp was struck, and the horses brought from the upper
meadows, where they had wandered in the night, and packed, the party
started up the trail.
"Gunsight Pass--I like that name," said Bob. "But how did it get the
name?"
"You'll see when we reach it," Mills replied.
The trail over Gunsight is one of the most interesting in the entire
Park. The head wall of the horseshoe of rocks which holds the green lake
is too steep to climb, so the path gets to the summit by working up the
shoulder of Jackson, in a long series of inclines, with sharp, steep
switchbacks every little way, to boost it a little higher up the steep
slope.
After climbing for, perhaps, two miles, they reached what appeared to be
the level of the Divide ahead of them, but they were still around on one
side of the horseshoe, and had to make their way along the tremendously
steep wall of the mountain till they got to the pass at the centre.
Between them and this pass lay a huge snow-field, two hundred yards
wide, and extending half a mile up the slope, and as far down, and
ending at the bottom right on the top of a precipice, which dropped off
into the lake. They could hear the melting water from this snow-field
falling down far, far below, over the precipice.
Mills stopped his horse, and studied the ground, while the two women
looked at the steep, gleaming, slippery field of snow, steeper than a
house roof, at the yawning hole at the bottom, and declared in loud
tones that they would _not_ go across.
But other parties had been across, and somebody had shoveled out a path,
about three feet wide, to make level footing for the horses. Still, even
so, it was a ticklish place, for if a horse once slid off, there would
be no stopping him short of the lake two thousand feet below.
"Everybody off!" Mills ordered.
"Joe, Dick, Val," he commanded, "lead all the horses over, one at a
time, and then two of you come back."
After the horses were across--and they did not have the least fear, even
when one of their feet would cut through the soft snow, and they
appeared to be in danger of slipping--Joe and Dick returned, and, with
Mills, led the two women and the girls over, and helped them back into
their saddles. Bob and the two congressmen came alone, and in the centre
of the slide, Bob made a big snowball, and let it roll down. Inside of a
hundred feet it appeared to be traveling a mile a minute, growing bigger
all the time, and finally it hit a rock at the bottom with a loud
report, and the broken pieces flew out over the hole below.
"Say, Joe," he called, "great place for skis, eh?"
Joe laughed, but not very mirthfully. The thought of going down that
slope on skis made you sick in the pit of your stomach.
It was but a few steps now, around a hanging ledge, to the pass, and as
they came out into the small level space on top of the Divide, they saw
in front of them, forming the northern gate-post of the pass, as it
were, a big rock pile shaped exactly like the front sight of a rifle--a
sight several hundred feet high.
"Now you see why it's Gunsight Pass," said Mills to Bob.
"Some gun!" the boy answered.
Those ahead moved to the western side of the Divide, and suddenly Joe
heard the girls screaming with delight. As soon as he got there, he
realized why, for never before had he seen anywhere such a wonderful
view.
Right below them, eight hundred or a thousand feet, lay the loveliest
little lake in all the world, oval in shape, a beautiful green in color,
possibly half or three-quarters of a mile long. Out of one side sprang
up the red precipices of Mount Jackson, from the upper end rose the wall
of the Divide to their feet, on the other side, sweeping around in a
circular curve carved by some ancient glacier as smooth as a drill hole,
was the precipice of Gunsight Mountain. At the farther end of the lake
the land just dropped away out of sight, and far off in the distance
they could see range after range of purple mountains. Right at their
feet, almost at the top of the Divide, was a pine tree, the only one,
the very outmost sentinel of timber-line. It was only eight feet tall,
though the trunk was two feet thick, and it was torn and twisted and
gnarled by the winds till it looked like a grim old fighter who had left
all the rest of his company far below and battled his way on up, almost
to the top.
[Illustration: Party Crossing Near Top of Gunsight Pass]
Even Mrs. Jones stopped her horse and admired this view.
"It's really worth coming for," she said.
"And how she hates to admit it," Val whispered in Joe's ear, for the
whole party was now gathered together on the edge, looking at the
prospect.
"What's the name of that heavenly little lake?" Lucy asked.
"Lake Ellen Wilson," Mills answered.
"Oh, dear, it shouldn't be--it ought to have a beautiful Indian name,
like Eye-of-the-morning, or something," said she.
"Let's name it Lake Lucy Elkins," Bob suggested. "Seems to suit you."
Joe thought so, too, but he did not say anything.
Lucy laughed. "If we only _could_ rename it," she answered, "I certainly
would find a pretty Indian name. I think it's terrible, the way we take
the land away from the Indians first, and then give everything new
names, in the bargain."
The trail now descended in switchbacks to the very shore of the lake,
for, although it had to climb up again at the lower, west side, the
precipices were so steep in between that the only way to get from one
point to the other was to descend to the shore.
"And this water is really going to the Pacific Ocean," said Mr. Jones,
as they reached the lake. "We are over the Great Divide, Bob!"
"Yes, I feel a change in the climate," the irrepressible Bob answered.
"That's not such a joke as you think, at that," Mills said. "The climate
is different over here, as you'll see presently."
They had still another pass to go over--Lincoln Pass (not a part of the
Divide) before they could begin the final descent to Lake McDonald, and
from the lake shore they began to climb again, with the green water
between them and the tremendous red walls of Jackson, where long, narrow
snow-fields clung in the hollows. At the top of Lincoln Pass was a
meadow, on the edge of a precipice, a meadow full of snow-fields, wild
flowers, and a few stunted, twisted pines, for it was on the very edge
of timber-line. Here Mills ordered a halt for lunch.
"Charlie Chaplin sandwiches again, Joe," he said. "You can make tea if
you want to, and can find any wood."
Joe and Bob and the girls between them managed to scrape together enough
dead wood to make a small fire, and the water Joe got from the little
brook flowing out from under a snow-field and starting on its long
journey to the Pacific Ocean.
After lunch, everybody wanted to sit around for a bit, and enjoy the
view of Lake Ellen Wilson and Mount Jackson, and Joe and Lucy got their
cameras from their packs, and took pictures of each other on horseback,
of the party, of Bob and Alice climbing down over an edge of the cliff
beside a waterfall, and finally of a wonderful, twisted pine.
"I love the old trees at timber-line," Joe said. "They look so sort
of--of heroic."
"Guess they are, all right," Bob laughed. "I'd feel heroic if I stood up
here in winter!"
Almost as soon as they started again, they began to drop down a steep,
rocky trail to the Sperry camp, a chalet built up on the slopes to
accommodate the people who want to climb over the Divide just behind it
to Sperry Glacier; and then to drop, by a wide, good trail, past rushing
brooks, into the first real forest Joe had seen. The climate certainly
_was_ different over here--he began to feel it. It seemed warmer, and
the air wasn't quite so vividly clear. There was a faint suggestion of
haze over the lower blue ranges out to the west. It must be different,
he told himself, there must be more rainfall, anyhow, and less severe
winter cold, or the trees wouldn't be so much larger.
Down and down they dropped, through spruces and pines and larches,
growing ever taller and larger, till suddenly the trail went into the
most wonderful forest Joe had ever seen. It was entirely composed of one
kind of tree, tall, straight, ghostly gray trees, with a thin bark that
shredded in strips on the smaller trunks; and these trees grew so
thickly together that their tops made a solid canopy over the ground
below, shutting out all sunlight, so that it was almost twilight deep in
the heart of the forest. Not a living thing grew on the forest floor; it
was simply a carpet of brownish, tiny needle-like dead leaves, and of
dead sticks and fallen tree trunks.
Joe heard Lucy, ahead of him, saying it reminded her of the woods that
Hop-o'-my-thumb and his brother got lost in. It reminded him of some
great forest he once dreamed about in a nightmare; and yet it was
beautiful, because of the ghostly gray of the tall trees, and the utter
hush and silence of its dim recesses.
"What kind of trees are these?" he called back to Val. "They look like
some sort of cedar."
"You can search me," Val answered. "I couldn't tell a tree from a
cauliflower. Great place for bears, though."
The trail here was so wide that Joe could trot ahead and ask Mills.
"Yes, they are cedars," Mills said. "They call 'em white cedars, I
believe. The wood is much softer than your slow-growing cedar in the
East. It's a great forest, isn't it?"
"Makes me sure I want to be a forest ranger," Joe answered. "Val says
it's a great place for bears."
"Hi, bears, ma!" yelled Bob. "Val says there's lots of 'em here. Say,
Mr. Mills, how soon are you going to show us that bear? You know you
promised one to-day."
"You'll see it yet--I never break a promise," the Ranger answered.
They rode on, down through the cedar forest, for a mile more, and
suddenly saw light through the trees ahead, trotted into a clearing, and
almost immediately found themselves by a good-sized hotel, built out of
this very cedar lumber, and on the shore of a big lake.
"Lake McDonald," said the Ranger.
"_And_ a hotel!" cried Mrs. Jones. "You can all camp where you like, but
_I'm_ going to have a room with a bath to-night."
"I wouldn't mind one myself," said her husband.
"Me, too," the other congressman put in.
"Well, I suppose that means we have to sleep in a stuffy old room
to-night, Alice," said Lucy, "and eat in a dining-room with a lot of
people. Oh, dear, I prefer Joe's cooking!"
"Looks as if you were going to have a snap to-night, Joe," said Mills.
"You want a room with a bath, too?"
"Oh, no," said Joe. "I'm going to take my blankets up into those cedars
and sleep."
"You are?" Bob cried. "Then I'm with you. We won't be quitters, anyhow.
Us for the rough life--and the bears."
"No, Bob, you'll come to the hotel with the rest of us," said his
mother.
"Aw, no, ma, let me go with Joe! Gee whiz, here we come three thousand
miles to rough it in the Rocky Mountains and you go and bunk up in a
flossy hotel--roughing it with hot and cold water, and a valet to black
your boots!"
Everybody laughed, and Mr. Jones said, "Let the boy have a good time,
mother. I guess he'll fare as well with Joe as he would in the hotel.
Joe's a Boy Scout, aren't you, Joe?"
"Yes, sir," Joe answered.
It was finally settled that way, and while the party went into the hotel
to get their rooms, Joe, the guides and Mills unpacked the horses and
stabled them, took the dunnage bags of the party to the hotel, and all
but Joe found their quarters in the annex. Joe picked out blankets for
two, an axe, some grub and a few cooking utensils, and as soon as Bob
came back, the two boys carted them back a few hundred yards into the
deep woods, in a wild spot well off the trail, made themselves a fire
pit against a big stone, which was so covered with green moss they first
thought it was a stump, spread Joe's poncho for a bed, on a raked up and
smoothed heap of the dead needles, and then went back to have a look at
the lake before supper.
It was still early, and the girls were out on the pier in front. Bob
spied a canoe for hire, and promptly engaged it. They all four got in,
with Joe as bow paddle and Bob as stern, and paddled straight out into
the lake, which was quiet now as the wind died down with the setting
sun. As they drew away from the shore, they began to realize what a big
lake it is--ten or twelve miles long, with great, dark cedar and
evergreen forests coming right down to the water's edge, and by the time
they were near the middle, they saw how above these forests here at the
upper end rose peak after snow-covered peak, piling up to the Great
Divide.
"It looks like a lake in Switzerland, doesn't it?" said Alice.
Joe, of course, had never been to Switzerland, so he looked all the
harder.
"Only I like it better," Lucy answered, "because here, except for the
hotel and those few cottages near it, you don't see anything but forest
and wilderness. It's so wild and lonely! Oh, dear, I'd like to _live_
here!"
"I'd like to sail an ice boat here in winter!" said Bob.
"And I'd like to fish here now," said Joe, as a fish jump
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