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.’”
“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.
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 encyclopædia,” 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 Cañon, 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 cañons 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.
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 post-cards 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.
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 Cañon 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 cañon, 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 cañon 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.”