“Good gracious! That looks as if people had been building a jolly high railroad out here.”
On the right rose a bare, steep ridge of sand and gravel, nearly ninety feet in height, and closely resembling a railway embankment.
“Well, boy,” laughed Dr. Phil, “if that’s a railroad, Nature built it, and by a mighty curious process too. The sand, rocks, and gravel of which it is mostly formed must have been swept here by a great rush of waters that once prevailed over this land. We call the ridge a ‘Horseback.’ If you like, we’ll climb to the top of it, after we’ve had our snack [lunch], and you can get a peep at the surrounding country.”
So they did. The top was level, and wide enough for two carriages to drive abreast; and the view from it was one which could never be forgotten. Around them were millions of acres of forest land, beautiful with the contrasts of October; here dipping into a cedar valley, in the midst of which they saw the silver smile of a woodland lake, there rising into a hill crowned with towering pines, some of them over a hundred feet in height.
But, most thrilling sight of all, they beheld, only half a dozen miles away, rising in sublime grandeur against the sky, the mountain of mountains in Maine,—great Katahdin. They had caught glimpses of its curved line of peaks before. Now they saw its forests, and the rugged slides where avalanches of bowlders and earth from the top had ploughed heavily downward, sweeping away all growth.
Cyrus lifted his hat, and waved it at the distant mass.
“Hurrah!” he cried. “There’s the home of storms! There’s old Katahdin! The Indians named it Ktaadn ‘the biggest mountain.’”
“Want to hear the Indian legend about it, lads?” asked Dr. Phil.
A general chirp of assent was his reply, and the doctor began:—
“Well, when the redskins owned these forests, they believed that the summit of Katahdin was the home of their evil spirit, or, as they call him, ‘The Big Devil.’ He was named Pamolah. And he was a mighty unpleasant sort of neighbor. Once, so tradition says, he ran away with a beautiful Indian maiden, and carried her up to his lonely lair among those peaks. When her tribe tried to rescue her, he let loose great storms upon them, his artillery being thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, before which they were forced to flee helter-skelter. An old red chief long ago told me the story, and added gravely that ‘it was sartin true, for han’some squaw always catch ’em debil.’