CHAPTER XXX--Tom Gets Back with the Doctor, and Mills Pulls

Through--Then the Scouts Have To Leave for Home

"Time to get up," said the voice of the owner of the hand.

Tom opened his eyes. The room was still lighted by a lamp, but something told him it was morning, perhaps the gray light at the window. He rose stiffly, and helped his host get breakfast. Going out, he found the Chinook wind had passed, but it had been blowing, apparently, a good while, for the lake was open water all the way inshore now, except for a fringe of ice cakes piled up like ragged surf along the eastern side.

"The lake hadn't frozen yet very far out, anyhow," the caretaker said. "But the Chinook's sure taken the snow down!"

It had. As if by magic, the eight or ten feet of snow that yesterday had covered everything except the trees was reduced to less than two. The air, too, while it had the sting of winter again, was not bitterly cold--just a nice winter temperature.

As the sun was beginning to redden the peaks above the lake, Tom heard the _put-put_ of a motor boat far off, and in half an hour a launch had worked in through the floating ice to the end of the pier and a ranger accompanied by a young man threw their packs on the pier and climbed out.

"_You_ the man that came over Swift Current yesterday?" the Ranger said, looking at Tom. "Why, you're only a boy!"

"Well, I did it--and I'd do more'n that for Mr. Mills!" Tom answered.

"You were takin' chances on the Swift Current head wall," the Ranger said. "I'm mighty glad the Chinook came, before I have to go down that trail."

"I got sort of used to slides," Tom said, as they all fastened on their packs, and waved farewell to the caretaker. He told the Ranger and the doctor about their ride on the snowslide.

"Say, you've been havin' an excitin' time up there," the Ranger laughed. "Wonder what's happened since you left?"

"If Mills has ptomaine poisoning, nothing has happened," the doctor said. "He's simply been wishing it would!"

They grew silent as the grind began up the canyon trail through the forest. Tom's tracks of yesterday, melted less than the unpacked snow, showed plainly, and often he had been way off the trail, taking short cuts ten feet up where he was clear of underbrush.

"Didn't intend to," he said. "But the snow was so deep I couldn't always see the trail, and just steamed straight ahead."

At noon they paused an hour for lunch and rest, and then picked up their loads again. The low sun was sinking behind Heaven's Peak when they reached the top of the pass, and took off their snow-shoes, for the Chinook had stripped all the snow from the Divide, where the wind had previously blown it thin. On the head wall, they found only a few inches, and they were able to slide from one switchback to the next lower, thus cutting off the turns and descending with great rapidity.

But even so it was dark before they reached the cabin, and once more Tom was traveling on sheer nerve. So was the doctor, for that matter, though the Ranger seemed as fresh as when they started. They had been on the trail for twelve hours, with only one hour rest.

But Tom was the first up the steps and in the door.

Joe sprang up from a chair to greet him, and by the lamplight he could see Mills, on the couch, and heard him say, in a weak voice, "Hello, Tom."

"Thank God!" Tom cried, and slumped down weary and exhausted on his pack.

The doctor went to work at once. "What have you done for him?" he asked Joe.

"Nothing much I could do," Joe said. "We gave him an emetic as soon as he was sick, and I gave him physic and hot water. The hot water seemed to ease him a little."

"Good," the doctor answered. "You couldn't have done better. He'll come around all right now. Sick, were you, Mills?"

Mills groaned for reply.

"When the Chinook came," Joe laughed, "I told him I thought a blizzard was going to hit us, and he said he hoped it would blow the cabin into the lake!"

Joe now hurried about getting supper and making up beds for the tired men, while Mills lay feebly on the couch and made Tom sit by him and tell about his trip.

"You shouldn't 'a' done it, boy," he kept saying. "You shouldn't 'a' risked it for the old Ranger."

But that night they were roused by hearing poor Mills in the throes of another attack. The doctor hurried to him.

"It's brought on a sort of acute indigestion," he said to the others. "I didn't realize he was so bad. It's lucky I'm here, for you can't let such attacks go on, or they get you."

All that night he and Joe sat up with the sick man, and all the next day, and the day after that, he kept the Ranger in bed, and doctored him.

The third day Mills was feeling better, and grew restless.

"You stay where you are," the doctor laughed, "and thank young Tom who got me, and Joe who dosed you till I came, that you're alive at all! I've got to go to-morrow, but Jerry will stay with you and feed you according to schedule till you're O.K. again."

"I suppose that means the boys are going to-morrow, too," Mills answered. "They--they got to be home for Christmas. Say, doc, can't you make 'em just sick enough so they'll have to stay?"

The doctor laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Maybe I can get you transferred to headquarters till you're all right again," he said. "Then you won't miss the boys so much."

But if it was hard for the Ranger to part with Tom and Joe, it was scarcely less hard for them to leave him, even if it did mean getting home to their families for Christmas, yet they could not put it off a day longer, because already they had just time to make connections at Chicago and reach home on Christmas morning. The Ranger's sickness had delayed them.

So Tom and Joe began to pack. They had long realized they would have to leave some day, and in mid-winter, so they had sent home by express all their summer clothes and their balloon silk tent and their folding cots, in their trunks, by the last bus out in October. But they still had a big load. All the books, except a few school books, they left for Mills. Most of their clothes they put on. The two sleeping-bags and the snow-shoes, which belonged to the Ranger, they were to leave with the station agent. Their bearskin caps and coats, which Mills had procured for them, he made them keep as a present, and Tom, for a present to him, left his skis behind. Joe left as his present the warm, soft bed puff he had used ever since he came to the Park, and his aluminum coffee-pot, to take the place of the battered old tin one Mills used.

They packed the toboggan that night, to be ready for an early start, and then sat around the stove for the last time, in the little cabin. The doctor and the other Ranger did all the talking. Mills, who lay on the couch, and the boys did not feel like saying a word.

The next morning Joe cooked the last breakfast. Poor Mills was not allowed to drink any coffee.

"I'm goin' to drink tea after this, anyhow, Joe," he said. "You've spoiled my taste for my own coffee, confound you."

He came to the door to help in the last packing of the toboggan. "If you've left anything, I'll keep it till you come back next summer," he said, trying to laugh.

"We'll be back!" the scouts cried. "We'll be rangers, too, some day, with you as our boss!"

"I'm goin' to miss you something fierce, boys," Mills added, taking each of them by the hand. "Tom, I can't never thank you proper for what you did--so we'll let it go at that. You're a regular scout, and you and Joe'll make good whatever you do, and Joe'll keep as well as he is now, always."

He turned his head suddenly away, and the boys felt a lump in their own throats.

Then they started.

When they looked back to wave, however, he was facing them, and they could see his pale, blue eyes--the eyes of a woodsman--looking at them as they went down the trail.

Opposite the entrance to their old camp, Joe dropped the rope, and ran down the path, to the surprise of Tom and the doctor. He came back with their rough sign, "Camp Kent," and stuck it into the load.

"Gee, if we'd forgotten that for a souvenir!" he cried.

Tom gave the doctor some wild rides on the toboggan in the next two days, while Joe took the hills on skis. They camped that night in the same woods as before, only this time they had no tent, only such protection as they could hastily rig up by making a rough lean-to of evergreen boughs and crawling under it in their sleeping-bags. Each one took a watch to keep the fire going during the night, and they managed to come through fairly comfortably, though it was bitterly cold. However, they were up long before the sun, and on their way.

The second day the boys knew they were seeing the mountains for the last time, and as they passed by old Rising Wolf, his red rocks buried under glistening snow, they loitered a little on the trail and walked with their eyes turned upward and toward the west.

And that evening they were suddenly landed out of the lonely snow-fields and the wilderness of rocks and cliffs and frozen lakes, of deer and lions and avalanches, into the hot, musty smell of a Pullman sleeping car, on the trans-continental limited, bound east!

They each took one sniff, and looked at one another.

Then Tom laughed. "We'll get used to it again," he said.

"I suppose so," Joe answered, "but gosh! it's going to be hard work."