“Suits me,” said Tom, always ready for anything in the way of exploratory hiking.
They struck into the trailless section south of Breakneck Mountain and pushed along in a westerly direction till they bumped into a trail running north and south. This brought them into the Tuxedo-Mt. Ivy Trail which they followed to the easterly end of Half Way Mountain. A leisurely exploration of this long mountain brought them out at Pine Meadow Brook. And so they passed out of the reservation to Sloatsburg by an unfrequented route.
They had an odd feeling, so Tom told me, that their sojourn in the dense forest would in some way advertise itself to the denizens of the outer world. And I think that he was a little disappointed that their backwoods career in the remote home of Long Buck Sanderson did not in some way give them a certain celebrity and prestige in the village. But the village did not know them for romantic treasure hunters. It sold them coffee and a sweater and a few post cards (one of which I received) and did not treat them as interesting pioneers and adventurers.
They returned along the Sloatsburg road and so came to Burnt Sawmill Bridge where the work on the new dam was going forward. The new lake would shortly spread over the country between this and the western reaches of Brundige Mountain with two long, watery arms embracing the mountain to the north and south.
The vicinity of the new dam was a perfect riot of mud and cement and rocks and disordered road. A dubious détour had been provided, which went down into a very wallow of muck where great trucks were emptying their loads of crushed stone and blocking even this temporary way.
“Worse than when we drove in, hey?” said Tom.
“Guess we won’t try to drive out this way,” Brent commented; “unless we get an airplane. They stamp out lakes these days like cookies, don’t they? You can’t depend on geography any more at all—build a dam and start a lake. They’ll be selling mountains and valleys in the five and ten next. Nature’s getting to be a regular quantity production proposition, like Fords.”
There were men wallowing knee-deep in mud, drilling rocks for blasting, sifting stone, and so forth. There were a couple of tents in the chaotic neighborhood and an old hut seemed to have been converted into a camp. There was something attractive about the whole confused scene as there always is about any kind of camp life. Several of the men, a fine, intelligent type, Tom thought, were guiding an apprehensive and fearful motorist through the worst part of the détour and explaining to him how he could accomplish the impossible and pass around a mammoth truck whose swinging body hung on end. They nodded in a friendly way at the returning campers, who paused to watch them.
“Lawton around?” Tom asked.
“Lawton?” one of the workers queried, and shook his head.