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.