OVER THE LAFAYETTE RIDGE, WITH A DINNER PARTY AT THE END
The two adventurers must have dropped off to sleep toward daylight, for
they were both conscious of being shaken and told to get up.
Peanut rubbed his eyes. “Gee, I dreamed one of those burglars had
grabbed me and was dragging me into Lost River,” he said.
“I suppose if I’d slapped your face you’d have dreamed of Alice Green,”
Lou laughed. “Come on, get up and wash yourself. Golly, but you’re
dirty!”
Peanut and Art were certainly dirty. They had gone on their expedition
the night before without hats, and their hair was full of dust, their
faces smeared with it, and their hands almost black from clinging to
the dusty trunk rack behind the motor. They both got up, and took off
their clothes, shaking clouds of dust out of them. Then they went down
to the brook, shivering in the chill morning air (it was full daylight,
but the sun was still hidden behind the high eastern wall of Liberty)
and washed themselves. When they returned to camp, they found breakfast
waiting.
“Well, well, it pays to be a hero,” said Peanut. “Somebody else does
the work for you, then.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t happen often, Mr. Modesty,” said Frank. “We were
too hungry to wait, that’s all.”
After breakfast they doused their fire, packed up, and went down the
road to the Flume House. It was still so early that none of the guests
in the old hotel were astir, though servants were about, sweeping the
verandas.
Peanut, Art and Rob showed where the rope had been stretched across
the road, with a red lantern on it, to stop the escaping motor, and
then led the way to the garage. The two watchmen, pistols in hand, were
sitting before the door.
“Hello, boys!” the head watchman said. “We still got ’em in there,
in the corner room. Sheriff’s coming over from Littleton for ’em as
soon as he can get here. You’d better not look at ’em--might make ’em
unhappy,” he added to Peanut, who was trying to look in the high window.
Peanut laughed. “We did rather gum their game, didn’t we?”
“You sure did. Here, stand on this chair.”
The boys all took a turn looking in the window. What they saw was two
men evidently asleep on a blanket on the floor.
“Don’t seem to trouble ’em much,” said Peanut. “Where’s their car?”
One of the watchmen led the way into the garage, and showed them the
car, which had come six miles on the rims.
“Stolen, of course,” he said. “It’s a five thousand dollar car, too.
Somebody else will thank you, beside Mr. Goodwin. Oh, say, I nearly
forgot. The sheriff says to hold you boys till he comes, because you’ve
got to give evidence.”
“Oh, no!” they all exclaimed. “We’ve got to get up Lafayette!”
“Tell the sheriff we’ll be at Mr. Goodwin’s at seven this evening, and
he can take the boys’ affidavits then,” said Mr. Rogers.
“Well, I dunno. He told me particular to keep ’em.”
“You can’t keep ’em if they want to go, you know, without a warrant,”
Mr. Rogers smiled. “Here, keep their names and addresses for him, and
tell him, Mr. Goodwin’s this evening.”
“Well, you got a fine day for the mountain,” the watchman said. “Go see
the Pool and the Flume first, and then just keep right up the head of
the Flume. You’ll hit the path.”
“How long will it take us to make Lafayette?” asked Rob.
“Six hours, I guess,” he answered.
“Easy,” said they. “Goodbye.”
They had turned away before Art and Peanut remembered to tip off the
watchman about the third thief, Jim, at the Profile stables. Then they
started once more.
The party now crossed the road, and entered a path through the woods,
marked “The Pool.” After a short walk through dense woods, they
descended rapidly through a break in a cliff wall, for nearly a hundred
and fifty feet, and stood beside the strangest little lake they had
ever beheld. It was about a hundred and fifty feet across, more or
less circular in shape, and surrounded by high cliffs which made it
seem like a pond at the bottom of a crater. The water, which was
astonishingly clear, came into it at the upper end in the form of a
cascade, and escaped not far from the boys through a fissure, or tiny
cañon, in the rocks.
“My, I’d like to swim in that! What a place to dive in!” cried Art.
“How deep is it?”
“About fifty feet, I believe,” said the Scout Master.
“Looks a thousand,” said Peanut. “Come on, let’s all have one dive.”
Rob felt of the water. “One would be about all you’d want,” he said.
“Besides, we haven’t time.”
The Scouts left the Pool reluctantly, climbed back up the cliff,
and found the path to the Flume. This Flume, they soon discovered,
resembled almost exactly the flume on Kinsman, save that the walls
were higher and stood farther apart, and it was also longer. But the
path to it was much more traveled, and there was a board walk built
up through it beside the brook, so that it did not seem so wild nor
impressive as the smaller flume on Kinsman. They soon passed through
it, found the path up Liberty, and began to climb.
As on all the White Mountains, the first part of the climb led through
woods, and no views were to be had, neither of the summit ahead nor the
valley behind. It was a steep path, too, much steeper than the Benton
Trail up Moosilauke, though not so steep as the Beaver Brook Trail
down which they had tumbled the day before. At first everybody was
chattering gaily, and Peanut and Art were telling over again all their
experiences of the night before. But gradually, as the sun mounted, as
the trail grew still steeper and rockier, as their packs and blankets
got heavier and hotter, conversation died out. Everybody was panting.
Rob, who was pacemaker for the morning, would plod away, and then set
his pack down to rest. The others rested when he did, and no oftener.
Climbing began to be mechanical. Art consulted his watch and his
pedometer.
“That Appalachian guide book isn’t far from right,” he admitted to Mr.
Rogers. “We aren’t making much over a mile an hour.”
“That’s enough, in this heat,” the Scout Master replied. “Better fill
canteens at the next spring, Rob,” he called ahead. “I don’t know
whether we’ll get any more water to Lafayette. I’ve forgotten this
trail.”
At the next spring they all took a long drink and a long rest. Shortly
after, they emerged above timber, and found themselves to the northwest
of the peak of Liberty, and almost at its base, while ahead of them the
path pointed up the rocky ledges toward Haystack. With full canteens to
add to their load, they plodded on.
Now they could see below them, far down into the Notch, and across the
Notch they could see the steep side of Kinsman going up, and the peak
where they had unfurled the flag on the Fourth of July. They began
to realize for the first time, too, how difficult it could become in
a cloud to keep the path, for where the trail led over bare rocks it
was almost indistinguishable under foot, and you had to look ahead to
find a pile of stones, or a place where it wound through the mountain
cranberries or other Alpine plants, to find it. The sun was very hot on
their backs, and all of them, under the blankets and knapsacks, were
perspiring freely.
“I’m wringing wet,” said Peanut. “Wish we had the Pool right here.
Would I go in? Hm----”
[Illustration: Echo Lake, Franconia Notch, and Mount Lafayette from
Bald Mountain]
But this lofty, bare space was also swept by a breeze, which curiously
enough dried the perspiration on their faces, and when they paused to
rest, taking off their packs, dried out their shirts so rapidly that
the evaporation made them cold.
Once on top of Haystack, their way over the summit of the ridge lay
plain before them, the view opened out on both sides, and they dropped
their burdens to have a long look.
Straight ahead, the path dropped down to the col between Haystack and
Lincoln--a col being the connecting spine, ridge, or saddle between
two peaks. This col was certainly a spine, bare, wind-swept, narrow,
nothing but an edge of gray tumbled rock. The mountain dropped down
sharply on both sides, and the boys exclaimed, almost in a breath:
“Gee, I’d hate to cross that with the winter storms sweeping it!”
“I’d hate to be anywhere above timber line, in a winter storm,” said
Mr. Rogers, “unless I was dressed like Peary on his dash to the Pole,
and the path was plain.”
It was perhaps a mile across the col to Lincoln. “And beyond that
another mile or more--up all the way--to Lafayette!” the Scout Master
cried. “Shall we make Lafayette before we lunch, or not?”
The Scouts all voted for it, and moved on again, across the col to
Lincoln. The path lay entirely over stones, not great levels of ledge,
but small, broken stones, making walking with anything but very stout
boots on extremely trying to the feet. All the way, on their left,
they could see down into the forests of the Notch, and they could look,
too, down upon the Lonesome Lake plateau, and even upon the top of
Kinsman, for they were higher than Kinsman already. On the other side,
toward the east, they looked down into a spectacle of indescribable
desolation--a wild region of deep ravines and valleys separated by
steep mountains, and the entire region stripped to the bare earth by
the lumbermen. On some of the steep hillsides, slides had followed, to
complete the destruction. This desolation extended as far eastward as
they could see, and was evidently still going on, for off to the south
they could see a logging railroad emerging from the former forest,
and once they heard, very faint and far off, the toot of a locomotive
whistle.
“When I was a boy your age, Rob,” said Mr. Rogers, “all that country
in there, which is known as the East Branch region, because the East
Branch of the Pemigewassett rises in it, was primeval wilderness. There
was a trail through from North Woodstock over Twin Mountain to the
Twin Mountain House, with branches to Thoreau Lake and Carrigain. It
was wonderful timber--hemlocks a hundred and fifty feet tall, great,
straight, dark spruces like cathedral pillars! I tramped through it
once--took three days as I remember. And look at it now!”
“Oh, why do they allow it!” cried Rob. “Why, they haven’t planted a
single new tree, or let a single old one stand. They’ve just _stripped_
it.”
“Yes, and spoiled the soil by letting the sun bake it out, too,” said
Lou.
“We aren’t such a progressive people, we Americans, as we sometimes
think we are,” the Scout Master replied. “In Germany they’d have taken
out only the big trees, and planted little ones, and when the next size
was bigger, they’d have taken them out, and planted more little ones,
and so on forever. And we Scouts could be hiking down there, beside a
rushing little river, in the depths of a glorious forest.”
“I’m never going to read a Sunday paper again--’cept the sporting
page!” Peanut answered.
“Do you read any more of it now?” Art asked.
“It wasn’t the Sunday papers which stripped that region,” said Mr.
Rogers. “It was a lumberman, who made boards and beams of the timber.
What did he care about the future, so long as _he_ got rich? Still, I
blame the state and the nation more than I blame him. He should never
have been allowed to lumber that wasteful way--nobody should. Look,
boys, there’s a cloud on Washington again.”
The boys had almost forgotten Washington in their interest in the
stripped forest below them. They looked now far off to the northeast,
twenty-five miles away as the crow flies, and saw just the blue bases
of the Presidentials, wearing a white hood.
“Say, will that cloud come over here?” asked Peanut. “Kind o’ lonesome
up here, as it is.”
“Ho, we’ve got a compass. We could always just go west, down to the
Notch road,” said Art.
Peanut looked down into the Notch. “Thanks,” he said, “but if you don’t
mind I’d rather go by a path.”
“I guess we’ve nothing to fear from those clouds,” said the Scout
Master. “The wind is west. They’re nothing but local.”
By this time they had reached the top of Lincoln, after a steady
upward toil. Another col lay ahead of them--just a huge knife blade
of jagged stone, with the path faintly discernible winding across it
and stretching up the rocky slope of the final stone sugar loaf of
Lafayette.
“There’s journey’s end!” cried Mr. Rogers. “All aboard for the final
dash to the Pole!”
They descended rapidly from Lincoln, and soon began the ascent again,
across the rising slope of the col, and then up the cone of Lafayette
itself.
“I’m getting sort of empty,” said Frank. “What time is it, Art?”
Art looked at his watch. “No wonder!” he said. “It’s one o’clock, and
after--twenty minutes after. What interests me is, how are we going to
cook any lunch up here on top?”
“We can’t,” Mr. Rogers said. “Of course, there’s no wood. We’ll just
have to eat something cold, or else wait till we can get down to timber
line.”
“Oh, dear! How long will that be?” said Frank.
“I should fancy we could make timber in half an hour from the top.”
“That would be two, even if we didn’t stay on top any time, wouldn’t
it?”
“I _gotter_ stay on top long enough to dry my shirt,” Peanut answered.
“It’s sticking to me.”
“Then you’ll have to eat emergency rations and sweet chocolate,” said
Art. “There’s nothing else which doesn’t have to be cooked.”
“We ought to bake some bread and have a bit of potted ham, or something
like that, for noon lunches,” said Rob. “I move we do it to-night.”
“To-night?” sniffed Peanut. “To-night, I guess you forget, we dine on
roast beef and plum pudding, because Art and I are heroes!”
“I _did_ forget, _both_ facts,” Rob laughed.
“Well, which is it, emergency rations, or wait till we get down to
timber?” asked the Scout Master.
“Emergency rations!” said Lou and Frank.
“Wait!” said Art and Peanut (who had eaten emergency rations before).
“It’s up to you to cast the deciding vote,” said Mr. Rogers to Rob.
Rob winked at the Scout Master and said, “Well, if Art and Peanut are
such heroes, a bit of nice, chewy pemmican won’t hurt ’em. I vote to
stay on top.”
“For two cents,” said Peanut, “I’d punch you in the eye.”
As they neared the top of the peak, they suddenly heard voices, which
sounded strange way up there, far above the world, where for hours they
had heard nothing but the rushing of the wind.
“Hello!” exclaimed Mr. Rogers, “there’s a party here ahead of us.”
“I’ll bet there are women in it, too,” cried Peanut. “And I wanted to
dry my shirt!”
“Hm,” said Art. “Seem to be times when even _you_ don’t want women
around.”
There were, however, no women in the party. As the Scouts crested the
final broken fragment of rock, they found themselves on a summit no
larger than a city back yard, and on that summit an old foundation
hole, where once a small summit house had stood. Down in this hole,
sheltered from the wind, were three men. Like the Scouts, they wore
khaki. They, too, had packs and blankets, and they all needed shaves.
They were eating their lunch as the boys suddenly appeared just above
them.
“Hello!” they called up. “Where did you come from?”
“Up from the Flume,” said the boys.
“Took the wrong way,” said the men. “That’s the way to go down. You got
the long trail up.”
“We like hard work,” Peanut retorted. “Excuse me while I dry my shirt.”
He took off his pack and blanket, and then peeled himself of his outer
and undershirt, spread them on a rock in the wind and sun--and began to
shiver.
“Wow! How this wind evaporates you!” he cried.
“Get down out of it,” commanded the Scout Master, “and keep moving.
You’ll get cold if you don’t.”
Peanut jumped into the foundation hole, out of the wind, and swung his
arms like a coachman in winter. Art took off his shirts, too, and did
the same thing. The rest decided to wait till they made camp at the
base.
“And now for the emergency rations,” cried Rob, undoing his pack.
(“Look at those guys--sandwiches! Oh, dear, wish you had a gun to hold
’em up, Art!” whispered Peanut.)
(“I’d like to,” the other whispered back. “‘Your sandwiches or your
life!’ eh?”)
Rob, meanwhile, had produced a small blue tin, and was opening it. The
three strangers looked on with an amused curiosity. Rob sniffed the
contents, assured himself that it was fresh, and with his knife blade
dug out a chunk for each member of the party.
“Gee, is that all I get for lunch?” said Frank, contemplating the piece
in his hand, no bigger than an English walnut.
“It’ll be all you’ll want, believe me,” said Peanut.
“And all you need to stop your hunger and nourish you till night,” Rob
added. “That’s condensed food.”
Peanut took his piece over to the three men. “I’ll swap this excellent
and nourishing morsel for a ham sandwich,” he said.
The men laughed. “You will not!” one of them answered, hastily stuffing
the last of his sandwich into his mouth. “I’ve tried that before,
myself. If you’ve got a little water to soften it up in, and a bit of
bread to put it on, it’s not so bad, at that.”
One of the other men passed over a sandwich--but not to Peanut. He gave
it to Rob. “Divide the bread,” he said. “It’ll make your rations go
better.”
Each boy, then, got a third of a slice of bread, and a tiny morsel
of ham. On this they put their chunk of emergency rations, softened
with the last of the water from the canteens, and began to eat. Nobody
seemed to be enjoying the food very much, but their expressions grew
less pained the longer they chewed.
“Beats all how long you can chew this before it disappears,” said Lou.
“Gets sweeter, too.”
“Maybe that’s the bread. Bread almost turns to sugar if you chew
and chew it without swallowing,” said Rob. “But this pemmican stuff
certainly is filling.”
“What’s it made of?” Lou asked.
“Rats and rubber boots,” said Peanut.
Mr. Rogers laughed. “Not exactly--put on your shirt, Peanut,” he said.
“Pemmican was originally made of dried venison, pounded up with fat and
berries. Now it’s made of dried beef pounded up with dried fruits and
fats, and packed into a jelly cake to harden. That’s about what this
is, I fancy. It’s very nourishing.”
“All right, but where’s the sweet chocolate?” Peanut demanded.
Rob passed out the chocolate for dessert, and after it was eaten,
everybody began to complain of being thirsty. The canteens were empty.
“There’s a spring just below the summit,” said one of the three
strangers.
“You mean there _was_,” laughed a second. “You drank it all dry on the
way up.”
“Let’s get there on the way down before he does,” cried Peanut.
“No fear,” the first speaker laughed, “we are going down over the
ridge, the way you just came up. We’re doing Moosilauke to-morrow.”
“By the Beaver Brook Trail?” the boys asked.
“Yes. Have you been over it? How is it?”
“It ain’t,” said Peanut. “It was, but it ain’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“He means it’s eroded into pretty steep drops in places,” Rob put in.
“We thought when we came down that it would be an awful pull up.”
“There’s a good logging road across the brook, though,” one of the
men said. “If you’d taken that instead of the trail you’d have had no
trouble. I was over it last year.”
“I’m glad we didn’t,” Art said--“at least as long as we were coming
down.”
Both parties now packed up their loads, took a last good look at the
view, with Washington still under the clouds, and said good-bye, the
three strangers going off down the ridge, the Scouts turning northwest,
and winding down the summit cone, over the rough, broken stones of
the path. At the base of the cone, they found the spring, a small,
shallow basin in the stones, so shallow that the water had to be dipped
gingerly to keep from stirring up the bottom. By the time the last boy
had drunk his fill, in fact, there wasn’t enough water left to dip.
Then the path turned due west, and descended at a more gradual angle,
still over small, flat, sharp fragments of stone, toward a little pond
in a hollow of the mountain’s shoulder, just below the line where the
dwarf trees stopped entirely.
They were soon on a level with this lake, which is called Eagle Lake,
but the path was two or three hundred feet south of it, and to get in
to it meant fighting through tough dwarf spruce and other verdure, only
waist high, but as good as a wire fence. They stuck to the trail, which
led through this dwarf vegetation almost on a level for some distance,
then actually began to go up-hill again, on to the west shoulder of the
mountain.
“Oh, rats!” cried Peanut. “I’ve gone up enough to-day!”
“Heroes shouldn’t be tired,” said Frank.
“Heroes need sleep, just the same,” Peanut retorted.
The ascent, however, was not for long. Soon they swung northwest again,
entered timber at last, and began to descend rapidly. After a mile
or so on this tack, the timber growing ever taller, they brought up
against the end of Eagle Cliff, which rose straight up in front of
them. Here the path swung west again, and began its final plunge to the
Profile House. It was a good, generous path through the woods. In years
gone by it used to be a bridle path, for people ascended Lafayette on
horseback.
“I’d hate to be the horse, though,” Peanut said, as he put his pole
ahead of him, and cleared six feet at a jump.
It was, indeed, a steep path, and they came down it at a high rate of
speed.
“Gee, we go up about a mile an hour, and we come down about six!” Art
exclaimed, catching a tree beside the path to stop himself.
They began to have glimpses of the Profile House between the trees.
The trail suddenly slid out nearly level in front of them; other paths
appeared, crossing theirs; and before they realized where they were,
they stood in the clearing, by the railroad station, and just beyond
them was the huge Profile House and the colony of cottages.
Peanut and Art sprang ahead. “Whoa!” cried Mr. Rogers. “Suppose we
leave our packs and stuff in the depot, and prospect light-footed, eh?”
The baggage master at the depot recognized Art and Peanut. He had been
one of the pursuing party the night before. He stowed their things
in his baggage room. “Guess you can have the freedom of the city!”
he said. “Wouldn’t wonder, if you went to the hotel, they’d give ye
something cold.”
“Come on!” cried Peanut.
“No,” said Art, “I ain’t so thirsty I have to be treated. I don’t think
we want to do that, do you, Mr. Rogers?”
“What do you think--on second thought, Peanut?” asked the Scout Master.
“Well, we’re taking a dinner from Mr. Goodwin, ain’t we?”
“Yes,” said Art, “but that’s different. We helped save his silver and
stuff. And it’s just in his family. Up there at the hotel, there’d be a
crowd around--women, and things. Looks kind of as if we were trying to
get into the lime-light.”
“Guess you’re right,” Peanut replied. “Come on, then, and show us the
Old Man of the Mountain, Mr. Rogers. But ain’t there a place where we
can _buy_ a drink?”
“We’ll find one--after we’ve seen the face,” the Scout Master laughed.
He looked at his watch. “After four, boys,” he added. “We’ve got to get
a camp ready, and spruce up before dinner, and I’ve got to go to the
hotel and get a shave.”
They stepped up from the railroad station to the road. Directly before
them was the Profile House, a large wooden hotel, facing south. Behind
it rose the steep wall of Cannon Mountain, and south of it, on the
lowest terrace of the slope, was a double row of cottages, ending, on
a bend, with a group including Mr. Goodwin’s. Behind the boys, back
where they had come, they could see the first steep, wooded slope of
Lafayette, and to the north the great rocky precipice of Eagle Cliff.
Looking south again, the road disappeared between the landslides of
Lafayette on the one hand, and the wall of Cannon on the other, a
narrow notch, not much wider than the road itself. The opening where
the boys stood was only large enough to hold the hotel and cottages,
and three or four tennis courts, on which a crowd was playing.
The party went south down the road, Peanut and Art pointing out Mr.
Goodwin’s house, and the track taken by the burglars, and quickly left
the houses behind. After a quarter of a mile or so, the woods opened
out ahead, and presently the boys stood in a place where the road was
enlarged to the left into a semicircle, and in that semicircle a team
or a motor could stop for the view.
“It’s the place!” cried Peanut. “Here’s where they left the car! And
those are the bushes we crawled into, Art!”
“And there’s the Old Man of the Mountain,” said Mr. Rogers.
The Scouts followed his finger. Looking through an opening in the trees
across the road, toward the southwest, they saw first a beautiful
little lake, so still that it mirrored every reflection, and then,
rising directly out of the woods beyond this lake a huge cliff, curved
at first, but gradually attaining the perpendicular till it shot up
like the side of a house, fifteen hundred feet into the air. At the
very top of it, looking southward down the valley, was, indeed, the
Old Man of the Mountain--a huge knob of rock thrust forth from the
pinnacle of the precipice, and shaped precisely like a human profile,
with sunken eye under a brow like Daniel Webster’s, sharp nose, firm
mouth, and, as Mr. Rogers said, “quite literally a granite chin.”
The boys looked at it in silence for a moment, and then Peanut said,
“But it looks so much bigger in all the pictures in the geographies.
Why, it really looks as small up there as--as the moon.”
“That’s because the photographs of it are taken with a telescope lens,
I guess,” said Frank. “My camera would make it look about six miles
off.”
“How big is it?” asked Lou.
“They say about eighty feet from forehead to chin,” the Scout Master
replied. “And it’s about fifteen hundred feet up the cliff.”
“I’d like to see it in full face,” Lou added. “Could we walk down the
road and see it that way?”
“We’ve not time, I’m afraid,” Mr. Rogers replied. “We’d have to walk a
mile or more. It isn’t so impressive full face. In fact, this is the
only spot where the human likeness is perfect. At many points along the
road the full face view shows only a mass of rocks.”
Lou was still looking at the great stone face gazing solemnly down over
the valley.
“It’s like the Sphinx, somehow,” he said. “I’ve always thought of the
Sphinx looking forever out over the desert, and this old man of the
mountain looks just the same way forever down the Notch. It gives me a
funny feeling--I can’t explain it. But somehow it seems as if he ought
to be very wise.”
Peanut laughed, but Mr. Rogers didn’t laugh.
“Lou has just the right feeling about it,” he said. “Lou has just the
feeling they say the Indians had. To the Indians, the Great Stone Face
was an object of veneration. Did any of you ever read Hawthorne’s
story, ‘The Great Stone Face’?”
None of the boys ever had.
“Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” said the Scout Master.
“I’m going to see if Mr. Goodwin has the book, and read it to you. How
would you like to take to-morrow off, and climb up to his forehead, and
read the story there, and then go over to the Crawford House by train,
instead of hiking the twenty-five miles over, on a motor road full of
dust?”
“Hooray! Me for that!” cried Peanut.
“Me, too!” cried the rest of the Scouts.
“Well, we’ll do it, if I can borrow the book,” said Mr. Rogers. “Now,
back to make a camp!”
At the depot the boys shouldered their packs again, and Mr. Rogers
directed them to go north up the road till they came to Echo Lake.
“Leave your packs at the little store,” he said, “and go down to the
boat house and get the man to take you out in a launch. I’ll get a
shave and meet you there.”
The Scouts set off up the road, and the Scout Master went into the
hotel. When he had been shaved, he followed up the road, and as he drew
near Echo Lake, a beautiful little pond at the foot of a great cliff
just north of Eagle Cliff, he heard the long-drawn note of a bugle
floating out over the water, and echoing back from the cliff. He called
the boys in from the landing.
“Oh, that’s lovely!” Lou exclaimed. “The sound just seems to float
back, as if somebody was up on top of the cliff with another bugle,
answering you!”
They paid the boatman and went back to the little store, where the boys
had already consumed two sodas apiece, and Peanut had bought two pounds
of candy. From there they went still farther north up the road, and
suddenly plunged down a path to the left, into a ravine, with a brook
at the bottom, and in among a grove of gigantic hemlocks.
“There are real trees!” said Mr. Rogers. “They are relics of the forest
primeval. ‘This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the
hemlocks’--and so forth.”
“Only there’s no ‘deep-mouthed neighboring ocean,’” Rob laughed.
“There’s a brook,” said Lou.
The hemlocks were indeed giants. They were three or four feet thick,
and rose sixty or eighty feet without a limb, their tops going on up
fifty feet more.
In among these superb trees, the boys made camp, selecting a spot some
way from the path, and hidden by underbrush. They all took a bath in
the cold brook, put on their one change of clean clothes, washing out
their socks and underclothes and hanging them on twigs around the camp
to dry. Then they carefully combed their hair, dusted their boots, and
tied each others’ neckties neatly. (Peanut’s tie was badly crumpled,
for it had been in his pocket all day.)
It was dark in the woods before they were ready, and it suddenly
occurred to them that they’d have trouble finding the camp again, later
in the evening.
“We might leave the lantern burning--if it would last,” said Lou.
“No, some one would see it, going by on the path,” Art replied. “We
don’t want to risk having our stuff pinched.”
“I know--tie a white handkerchief to a bush by the path where we turn
off to camp, and then count the number of steps back to the road,” said
Frank.
“Almost human intelligence,” Rob laughed, “And take the lantern with
us, to find the handkerchief with.”
“Right-o!” said Peanut.
It was time now to start for the dinner party. They tied the
handkerchief to the bushes by the path, and everybody counted his own
steps out to the road, in case the mark should be lost, or taken down
by some passer-by. Then they moved up the road, past the gaily lighted
Profile House, where they could see the guests eating in the big
dining-room with its large plate glass windows, and again rang the bell
of Mr. Goodwin’s house--but more quietly this time.
A servant ushered them in, and Mr. Goodwin and his wife and son and
daughter at once came forward to greet them. The house was elaborately
furnished for a summer “cottage,” and the boys were rather conscious of
their scout clothes and especially of their hobnail boots.
“Gee,” whispered Art, “keep on the rugs all you can, or we’ll dig holes
in these hardwood floors.”
“So these are Peanut and Art,” said Mr. Goodwin, after introductions
all around, turning to the pair who had given the alarm the night
before. “I’m sorry to say, we can’t have dinner till the sheriff has
disposed of you two chaps. He’s waiting in the library now with a
stenographer.”
Mr. Goodwin led the way into his library, where, sure enough, the
sheriff was sitting.
“Here are your men,” said the host. “Don’t keep ’em too long. We’re all
hungry.”
The rest of the party sat near by and listened, while the sheriff
swore in Art and Peanut. First they had to hold up their right hands
and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth. Then they gave their names, ages and residence, while the
stenographer’s pencil was busy making shorthand marks which Peanut,
regarding out of the corner of his eye, thought looked more like hen
tracks than anything else.
“Now, tell me exactly what happened last night, from the beginning,”
said the sheriff. “I don’t want to ask you to come way up here from
Massachusetts for the trial, so I’m taking this sworn testimony now. I
think we have evidence enough to make your actual presence unnecessary.”
Peanut started in on the story, told of his being awakened by the sound
of the motor stopping in the road, of waking Art, of their sneaking out
through the bushes, and hearing the two burglars talk.
“What did they say, as exactly as you can remember it?” asked the
sheriff.
Peanut turned red, and glanced toward Mrs. Goodwin and her daughter.
“Have I got to tell exactly?” he stammered. “We ain’t allowed to talk
that way in the Scouts, even without ladies present.”
Everybody laughed, and the officer with them.
“You can put in blanks,” he answered.
Peanut, with Art’s help, and also Rob’s, who came upon the scene at
this point, as the reader will remember, and also with the aid of many
“blanks,” reconstructed the conversation as well as he could. Then
Art took up the narrative, and described the ride up the valley, the
cutting of the tires, the pulling out of the wire in the engine (which
the burglars had put back again), and the subsequent arousing of the
neighborhood.
“Well, that’s some story!” said the sheriff, with admiration. “That’s
what I call quick action, and brave action. One thing you didn’t do
you might have--you might have cut out a piece of that wire so they
couldn’t have put it back. But if you had, they wouldn’t have tried to
get away in the car, but would have taken to the mountain, and perhaps
escaped, so it’s just as well.”
He shook hands heartily with Art and Peanut, and then with the rest of
the boys, and departed.
“Now for dinner!” cried Mr. Goodwin.
Mrs. Goodwin led the way to the dining-room, while her husband
explained to the boys as they went along that all the wedding presents
had been shipped back to a New York vault, under guard that day, to
avoid the chance of another scare.
They took their places at the big table, which was gay with candles,
Art and Peanut having places of honor beside Mrs. Goodwin and her
daughter. There were great, snowy napkins to spread on their laps, and
there was iced grape fruit to begin on, and soup, and roast beef, and
all sorts of good things, ending up with ice-cream. As it was after
seven thirty before they sat down, and the boys had eaten nothing but
emergency rations at noon, you may be sure that nobody refused a second
helping of anything, just to be polite. In fact, Mrs. Goodwin saw to it
that everything came around twice.
“My, nobody has eaten like this in my house for a long time!” she said,
“and a housekeeper does like to see her food enjoyed. John”--this to
her husband--“why don’t you climb Lafayette every day, so you can get
up a real appetite?”
“I wouldn’t, alas!” he laughed. “I’d just get lame legs and a headache.
Lafayette’s for the young folks. Have some more ice-cream, Peanut?”
“Gee, I’d like to--but I’m full,” said Peanut, so honestly that
everybody roared.
“I don’t suppose you carry an ice-cream freezer in your packs, do you?”
Mrs. Goodwin laughed.
“We don’t,” said Rob, “nor grape fruit nor napkins, either. I’m afraid
this luxury will spoil us for camp to-morrow!”
“Do you know,” Mr. Goodwin said, “I’m tired of luxury, myself. If I was
twenty years younger, I’d get a blanket out and go with you boys for
the next few days, and eat bacon and flapjacks out of tin plates, and
have the time of my life.”
“Come on!” the Scouts cried.
And Peanut added, “You ain’t old. Why, Edward Payson Weston’s lots
older than you are!”
“And he walked from San Francisco to New York didn’t he?” Mr. Goodwin
laughed. “Well, I guess his legs are younger than mine. Where do you go
to-morrow, by the way?”
This reminded Mr. Rogers of the book, so he asked if he could lend him
a copy of Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales.”
“If you can,” he said, “we are going up Cannon to-morrow morning and
read ‘The Great Stone Face,’ and then go over to the Crawford House on
the train, to be ready for the Bridle Path the next day.”
“Have we got it--the book?” Mr. Goodwin asked his wife.
She shook her head, but the daughter spoke--“The Andersons have a copy,
I know. I’ll run over and get it after dinner.”
“Fine--and as to that train--nothing doing,” said Mr. Goodwin. “You’ll
all get in my touring car after lunch, and the driver’ll take you over
to Crawford’s, and show you some sights on the way. I’ll tell him to
take you through Bethlehem first. Now, don’t say no! I want to do that
much for you.”
The Scouts thanked him, and agreed to be ready at two o’clock, on
the next day, for the start. They rose from dinner now, and strolled
out-of-doors. There was music at the Profile House.
The entire party loitered along the board walk in front of the
cottages, with the great, dark wall of Lafayette going up against the
stars directly across the road, and sat on the Profile House veranda
a while, listening to the music within. Dancers came out and walked
back and forth in front of them between dances--men in evening clothes,
girls in low-necked white dresses. It was very gay. But how sleepy
the Scouts were becoming! Mr. Rogers saw it, and whispered to their
hostess. They walked back to the house, got the book, said good-night,
and once more tramped down the road.
“Gee, it’s ten o’clock,” said Art. “Awful dissipated, we are.”
Peanut yawned. “Bet I’ll hate to get up to-morrow. Wow, some class to
that dinner, though! Ain’t you glad we were heroes, boys?”
Lou was lighting his lantern. “I’m glad you picked out Mr. Goodwin to
warn,” he laughed.
They were alongside of Echo Lake now. “If I wasn’t so sleepy, I’d like
to go down there and make an echo now, in the night,” said Lou. “It
would be kind of wild and unearthly.”
“Yes, and easy to do, seeing’s we have no bugle and no boat,” said
Frank. “Me for bed.”
They now turned in from the road, and followed the path, each one
counting his steps. But, as the path was down-hill, and they had
counted first when going up-hill, everybody was still many paces
shy when Lou, who was leading with the lantern, suddenly spied the
handkerchief, still tied to a bush. They turned into the underbrush,
and after considerable stumbling in the dark, amid the undergrowth and
the gigantic hemlock trunks, the lantern light fell on a shimmer of
white--one of the shirts hung up to dry--and they found their camp. It
wasn’t five minutes later when the camp was once more dark and silent.