“Three more days’ hiking—and four nights, sleeping out, as a Rubicon,” laughed Terry Ross, a tall, twenty-year-old maiden, long-legged, slender-backed.
“Oh! we’ll cross it—head up to the last step,” protested valiant voices. “Don’t be too sure. Wait until the tail of the day—and the last long mile,” suggested others. “It’s only one o’clock now.”
Six o’clock—and a sun setting! Setting royally behind hills that rose, detached, pell-mell, like huge, green bubbles, on either side of a mountain trail! Hills clad upon their lower slopes by acres of feathery podgum—hairy as Esau’s hands—with dark spruce woods above!
Six o’clock—and packs weighing heavily! Una next door to trailing hers by its cross ropes in the dust—almost like the can at the old dog’s tail—but the hand of Pemrose or warm “Copper-nob” steadied it upon her back!
Six o’clock! And it was not their fit-for-fit song of the Mountains At Home that steadied pluck now, kept girlish feet from slipping backward on the trail but the song made sacred in mud and mettle by their brothers over there:
“Oh! it’s not the pack that you carry on your back,
Nor the rifle on your shoulder,
Nor the five-inch crust of khaki-colored dust,
That makes you feel your limbs are growing older,
It’s not the hike on the hard turnpike