Harry just laughed and said he wouldn’t miss it for anything. So we took two lanterns and started off along the road that ran north, and pretty soon we hit into the main road out of Haverstraw and came to the big white house with the windmill. Pretty soon we hit into the cow path that led up through the woods. It wasn’t just like the fellow said, because it fizzled out in a pasture. Anyway, across the pasture were thicker woods and we picked up the mountain trail there. If he had told us that it started right near a big stone, it would have saved us a lot of hunting around with our lanterns. That’s just the way it is with big fellows; they think they’re so smart that they don’t know anything. Gee whiz, you didn’t need a microscope to see that rock, but he never even mentioned it over the ’phone.
One thing, who ever named that mountain Eagle’s Nest ought to apologize to the first eagle he meets. It would have been a crazy eagle that would build a nest like that. As nearly as I could make out it was a lot of mountains all jumbled into one. Harry said it was a kind of a bouquet of mountains.
The trail led up through a pine forest and first it was easy following it. Then it went down into a hollow and got mixed up with a lot of rocks. I guess that must have been one of the rooms of the eagle’s nest. Anyway, we couldn’t follow it through there so we took a chance and picked it up on the other side.
That’s where the climbing began. Oh boy, that was some tangle—all underbrush and scrub oak. Good night, I don’t know how those girls ever got through there. Pretty soon I stopped and began sniffing.
“Do you know what it reminds me of?” I said. “It reminds me of raking up the leaves at home.”
“It smells like a rake,” Hunt Manners said, just joking.
“No, but I mean burning autumn leaves,” I said; “you know how it smells in Bridgeboro in the autumn. Then you know it’s getting cold and Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming. Anyway, you can laugh, but that smell always reminds me of Thanksgiving.”
Harry just sniffed, but didn’t say anything, and we started up again. There were lots of big hubbles, kind of valleys in the mountain, and most of them were rocky. I guess in the daytime it would be easy enough to keep the trail in those places, but at night, we had some job.
In one of those places we heard a sound as if some one was moving and we all stopped short and looked around. Pretty soon Dorry whispered for me to look, and he pointed to a dark thing kind of sneaking away.
Harry called, “Who’s there?”