THE CRAWFORD NOTCH
The road kept on going down, too, through the woods. The driver told
them that this was Three Mile Hill, and nobody disputed him. It was
certainly three miles. All the cars they met coming up were on the
lowest speed, and chugging hard. At the bottom, they came into the
little village of Franconia, and behind them they could see the
mountains they had been climbing, piled up against the sky.
“How about grub?” Art suddenly exclaimed. “We’ve got to stock up before
we start to-morrow. In fact, we haven’t enough for supper to-night--and
it’s Sunday.”
Nobody had thought of that, but Mr. Goodwin’s chauffeur was equal to
the emergency. He drove to the storekeeper’s house, who opened the
store, and sold them what they needed.
“Suppose I’m breaking the law,” he said, “but _I _shouldn’t want to see
you fellers go hungry!”
Then they got in the car again, turned eastward, climbed a hill past
the Forest Hill Hotel, and spun along the Gale River road toward
Bethlehem, a pretty road through the woods, beside the rushing Gale
River. After a few miles, the road climbed a long hill, away from the
river, and suddenly, at the top of the hill, they looked out across the
valley to the whole panorama of the White Mountains. To the right, a
little behind them, rose Cannon and Lafayette. Directly south was the
sharp cone of Garfield, then the two tall Twins, then, still far to the
east, but nearer than they had yet seen them, the blue Presidentials,
with Washington clear of cloud, and the Summit House showing.
“Some sight!” exclaimed Peanut.
They now came speedily into Bethlehem, a town high upon a hill, with
many hotels and many stores and summer houses, along a single street, a
street a mile long, with golf links at one side of the road, and many
people in gay summer clothes walking up and down. The chauffeur drove
the length of the street and back (stopping, at Peanut’s demand, to
get sodas at a drug store) and then turned the car eastward once more,
toward Mount Washington.
The going was good, and the driver “let in the juice,” as Peanut
expressed it. They rushed along at thirty miles an hour, with Mount
Washington getting closer every moment.
The Scouts took off their hats, and the warm wind blew through their
hair.
“Pretty fast walking we’re doing to-day!” cried Peanut.
In less than an hour, in fact, they had swung with the bend of the
rushing Ammonoosuc River into a considerable level plain, and found
themselves in the midst of a settlement. There were two or three
railroad tracks, cottages, a small hotel, then a big hotel--the Fabyan
House, and a junction railroad station, and then, still closer to the
great wall of the Presidential range, which now loomed up directly
in front of them, the Mount Pleasant House, and half a mile to the
left, across a beautiful green golf course, the huge bulk of the Mount
Washington Hotel.
“Golly, that hotel is as big as Mount Washington itself,” said Art.
The chauffeur laughed. “Yes, and the prices are as high,” he said.
They now passed along the road, between the two hotels, headed south,
and then began to go up-hill, leaving the Presidential range more
and more on their left. Soon they lost sight of Washington, with the
curving line of the railroad up its flank. After two miles, they lost
sight of all the range. On their left was only a high, wooded slope. On
their right was the same. In front of them a white hotel and railroad
station suddenly appeared, and in front of that was only a narrow
defile between the two hills, just big enough to let the road and
railway through.
“The Crawford House!” said Mr. Rogers. “And ahead is the gateway to the
Crawford Notch. All out!”
They got out of the motor beside the hotel, and thanked the chauffeur
for their trip. They had come twenty-seven miles farther on their way
since two o’clock, and it was not yet four!
“Now,” said Mr. Rogers, when the car had turned back home, “the
Crawford Bridle Path starts right here in these woods across from the
hotel. That’s it, there. I move we tote our stuff up it far enough to
make camp, and then take a walk down into the Notch.”
“Second the motion,” said Frank.
Picking up their burdens, the boys walked a quarter of a mile eastward,
by a beaten path that ascended at a comfortable angle, not far from a
brook. Presently they found a pool in the brook, hid their stuff in the
bushes fifty feet from the path, and hurried back to the Crawford House.
Just below the hotel and the railroad station was a small pond.
“That pond,” the Scout Master said, “is the head waters of the Saco
River. We are on a divide. Behind the hotel, the springs flow north
into the Ammonoosuc, and thence into the Connecticut. They empty,
finally, you see, into Long Island Sound. The water of this lake
empties into the Atlantic north of Portland, Maine. Yet they start
within two hundred yards of each other.”
Just south of the little pond, the boys noticed a bare, rocky cliff,
perhaps a hundred feet high, rising sharp from the left side of the
road. The top was rounded off.
“Look!” said Lou. “That cliff is just like an elephant’s head, with his
trunk coming down to the road!”
Mr. Rogers laughed. “They call it the Elephant’s Head,” he said.
“You’re not the first to discover the resemblance.”
When they had passed the Elephant’s Head, they saw that the gate of the
Notch was, in reality, not wide enough to admit both the carriage road
and the railroad. The railroad, on their right, entered through a gap
blasted in the solid rock. A few steps more, and they were in the gate
themselves, and the wonderful panorama burst upon them.
They saw that the railroad kept along the west bank of the Notch,
high above the bottom, but the carriage road plunged directly down,
beside the Saco River (at this point but a tiny brook). On the west
side of the Notch Mount Willard rose beside them, and south of that
Mount Willey shot up almost precipitously, the latter being over four
thousand feet high. On the east side was the huge rampart of Mount
Webster, also four thousand feet high, and nearly as steep, with the
long white scars of landslides down its face.
“Well!” said Peanut, “the Franconia Notch was some place, but this one
has got it skun a mile. Gee! Looks as if the mountains were going to
tumble over on top of you!”
“They did once, on top of the Willey family,” said Mr. Rogers. “Come
on, we’ll walk down till we can see how it happened.”
The road plunged rapidly down-hill, into the forest at the bottom of
the Notch. They met one or two motors chugging up, and having a hard
time of it. In one case, everybody but the driver was walking, to
lighten the load.
“I came down this hill on a bicycle once--only once,” said the Scout
Master. “It was back in 1896, when everybody was riding bicycles. I was
trying to coast through the Notch. Somewhere on this hill I ran into a
big loose stone, head on, and the bicycle stopped. I didn’t, though.
The man with me couldn’t stop his wheel for nearly a quarter of a mile.
Finally he came back and picked me up, and took me back to the Crawford
House, where they bandaged up my head and knee. Somebody brought the
wheel back on a cart.”
“Say, it would make some coast on a bob-sled, though!” cried Peanut.
“Wouldn’t be any rocks to dodge then.”
“And there’d only be about ten feet of snow in here to break out, I
reckon,” Art answered.
“Nearer thirty,” said Mr. Rogers.
Over two miles below the Crawford House they came to the site of the
old Willey House, and saw through the trees to the west the towering
wall of Mount Willey, scarred still by the great landslide, seeming to
hang over them.
“There’s where she started,” said Mr. Rogers, pointing to the top of
the mountain. “It was back in late August, in 1826, that the slide
came. There had been a drought, making the thin soil on the mountain
very dry. Then came a terrific storm, a regular cloudburst, and the
water went through the soil and began running down on the rocks
underneath. That started the soil and the trees on it sliding, and they
gathered headway and more soil and debris and rocks as they came, the
way a snowball gathers more snow, and presently a whole strip of the
wall was thundering down.
“There had been a smaller slide in June, which had terrified the
family, and Willey had built a sort of slide-proof shelter down the
road, in case another came. It wasn’t so far away that the family
didn’t have time to get to it, if they started when they heard the
slide first coming, and nobody has ever been able to explain why none
of them got there. James Willey, a brother of the dead man, however,
always said that his brother’s spirit came to him in a dream, and told
him that the terrible rain, which had caused a rise of twenty-four
feet in the Saco, made them fearful of being drowned, and when the
water reached their door-sill, they fled not to the shelter hut, but
higher up the slope. Then, when the slide came, they were too far away
from the hut to escape. They had evidently been reading the Bible just
before they fled, for it was found open in the house.”
“In the house?” cried Peanut. “Didn’t the house get swept away?”
“No, that’s the oddest and saddest part of the story. The slide split
on a great boulder or ledge behind the house, and if they’d stayed in
it, not a soul would have perished. As it was, Mr. and Mrs. Willey,
five children, and two hired men were all killed. Three bodies were
never found. Only the dog escaped. He appeared at a house far down
the road, the next day, moaning and howling. He was seen running back
and forth for a few hours, and then he disappeared and was never seen
again. It was two or three days before the floods went down enough to
allow rescue parties to get up the Notch, however.”
“Let’s go see the rock that split the slide,” said Lou.
Mr. Rogers led the way behind the site of the old house, and showed
them the top of the rock, above the ground.
“This boulder was thirty feet high in 1826,” he said. “The landslide,
as you see, nearly buried it; but it split the stream, and the debris
all rushed in two currents on either side of the house, uniting again
in the meadow in front. The house stood for many years after that. I
think it was destroyed finally by fire.”
“But what gets me is, why should anybody want to live in such a
lonesome spot, anyhow?” said Peanut. “Gee, it’s getting dark down here
already.”
“Well, there was no railroad in those days,” Mr. Rogers answered,
“and the road through the Notch was the main artery of travel to the
northern side of the mountains. I suppose the Willey House made a good
stopping place for the night. Let’s go up to the railroad now, and get
a look at the engineering job, which was a big thing in its day--and is
still, for that matter.”
They climbed some distance through birch trees up the steep western
wall of the Notch before reaching the railroad. Once upon it, they saw
the great gap in the hills to far better advantage, however, than from
the road below. Willey shot up directly over their heads, as steep a
long climb, probably, as there is anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains.
The Scouts came very near deciding to give up a day from Washington,
and tackle it. Directly across the Notch they could see the whole
long, beetling brow of Webster.
“It kind of looks like the pictures of Daniel,” said Peanut. “Stern and
frowning.”
“And the slides are the furrows in his forehead,” laughed Rob.
But it was looking north that the view was most impressive. The
railroad hung dizzily on the side wall, with the rocks apparently
tumbling upon it from the left, and it about to tumble down the rocks
to the right. It curved eastward a mile or two ahead, and at the bend,
facing down the Notch, was the precipitous southern wall of Mount
Willard, almost a sheer rock cliff a thousand feet high. As the party
walked up the track, the cliff grew nearer and nearer, and as the
daylight faded in this deep ravine, it seemed more and more not to be
straight up, but to be hanging forward, as if ready to fall on top of
them.
“I’d hate to be in here during a thunder-storm,” said Lou. “It’s--it’s
kind of terrible!”
They came through the gate of the Notch at six o’clock, and there was
the Crawford House in daylight, and above it, on the slope of Clinton,
were the rays of the sun!
“Good little old sun,” said Peanut. “Wow! I’d hate to live where it set
every day at four o’clock.”
They now hurried up the Bridle Path to their camp, and Peanut tied the
flag to a tree, in honor of the first camp on the Washington trail,
while the others began preparations for supper or cut boughs for the
night.
When the supper dishes were cleared away, they heard a faint sound of
music coming up to them from below. Peanut pricked up his ears.
“Concert at the Crawford House!” he said. “Let’s go down and hear it.”
“It sounds pretty nice right here,” said Mr. Rogers.
“Aw, come on!” Peanut urged. “We can get post-cards there, too, I
guess. Art wants to send one to his Pinkie.”
“Shut up!” said Art. “What you really mean is that you want to get some
candy.”
“No, I don’t. I got some left from this afternoon.”
“You have!” said Frank. “You old tightwad! Why don’t you pass it
around?”
“’Cause I sat on it by mistake,” Peanut answered. “Come on down to the
hotel.”
“Maybe we’d better,” Rob put in. “We can all send a card home to our
folks.”
“Not forgetting Pinkie,” said Peanut to Art, as he ducked down the
path, stumbling in the dark.
Lou took the lantern, and tied his handkerchief to a bough over the
entrance to the camp. The rest waited till this was done, and followed
behind him. They didn’t catch Peanut till the very bottom.
“That was easy,” he said. “I’m like the old geezer on Moosilauke--got a
sixth sense in the soles of my feet. Besides, if you get off the path,
you bump into a tree, which knocks you back in.”
The brightly lighted windows of the Crawford House were open, and the
sound of the orchestra was floating out. Many people were walking up
and down on the veranda. They were all dressed elaborately, many of the
men in evening clothes. The little party of five boys and a man, in
flannel shirts and khaki, attracted much attention as they entered the
lobby of the hotel.
“Gee,” Art whispered, “think of coming to the mountains for a vacation,
and having to doll all up in your best rags! That’s not my idea of fun.”
“It’s my idea of the ultimate zero in sport,” laughed Rob.
Peanut had at once found the post-card stand, and was offering Art a
“pretty picture for Pinkie” as the latter came up.
“All right!” Art laughed. “I’ll send it!”
But he wouldn’t let anybody else see what he wrote.
The others all sent cards home, and, not to be outdone by Art, they
sent cards also to the girls they had met in Lost River. Peanut found
a picture of the top of Mount Washington to send to Alice, and he
carefully drew a picture of himself upon the topmost rock, like this:
[Illustration]
On the other side he wrote, “The persevering Peanut on the Peak.”
“Guess that’s some alliteration!” he said. “Mr. Rogers, what painter’s
name began with P?”
“Perugino,” said the Scout Master.
“Do you mind spelling it--slowly?”
Mr. Rogers spelled it, and Peanut added on the card--“Painted by
Perugino.”
“Guess that’ll hold her royal highness for a while!” he laughed.
Then he bought a stamp, and triumphantly dropped the post-card in the
letter box.
The boys sat on the veranda for a while, listening to the music, until
Rob and Mr. Rogers noticed that Art’s eyes were closed, and Peanut’s
head bobbed down upon his chest every few minutes, and Frank and Lou
were yawning.
“Bunk!” said Rob.
Lou relit the lantern, and they climbed back up the path to camp.
“We are on the way up Washington at last,” said the Scout Master as
they were rolling up in their blankets. “At this time to-morrow, we’ll
be asleep on the highest point east of the Rockies, and north of
Virginia.”
“Hooray,” said Peanut. “Let Per--Per--Perugino know, please.”