"What a mess!" the boys all exclaimed. "You don't expect us to eat that stuff, do you?"
"You needn't trouble yourselves; I can eat every bit of it. Wait till I sprinkle white sugar all over it thick and heavy, and then it is done. Come, do you want any, or shall I eat it all myself?"
"As Caterer Brown has made it, we won't hurt his feelings by refusing," said Arthur. "Hand it along."
"Well, Ned," said Phil, "this is capital. Do they teach cooking in your school, or has Miss Parloa been in this part of the country?"
"Oh, last winter when I camped out up North with father and the other lumbermen, they used to make this 'most every night, and I tell you it tasted mighty good."
After supper the boys whiled away the time telling stories. The most interesting one was the legend of Chocorua, the Indian chief after whom the mountain was named.
Chocorua had a son, a boy of ten or twelve years, who often visited the house of a white man who lived in Albany, at the foot of the mountain. One day while there he accidentally ate some food which had been prepared for a fox, and soon after died. This brought out the Indian spirit of revenge in Chocorua, so that he watched his opportunity, and when the father was away, killed the wife and children. Cornelius Campbell, the father, though a white man, was not a Christian, and the same revengeful spirit took possession of him. Not long after, Chocorua, while standing on the edge of a precipice, was shot by Campbell. He lived only a few moments, uttering fearful curses against the white men. He was never buried, but his bones were left to whiten on the rocks.
All Ned's talk tended to make the boys ready to start at every sound, and Arthur inwardly began to wish he had not disregarded the warning voice he had heard in the morning. Even the other boys felt a little dismal; but they all forced out loud exclamations over the pleasure of the day, and the moment after they had dropped on their bed of pine boughs were all sound asleep.
The clouds which, unnoticed by the boys, had been forming behind the hills, gathered heavily in a threatening mass over the mountain-peak, the air trembled with peal after peal of rolling thunder, the sky was brilliant with lightning flashes which sent gleams of intense and livid light over the white cliffs. Still the boys slept on. The furious storm-clouds gradually dropped lower and lower, until at last they burst in one torrent of hail and rain. Every hollow was fast filling up, until the one in which our boys were encamped became as it were the bed of a pool, and the white canvas of their tent seemed like the tip of a sail flapping in the wind.
One of those fearful claps of thunder which seem to shake the whole earth, and which are heard only among the mountains, at last roused the boys. In terrible alarm, they waded from their tattered tent, just in time to see the tall tree near whose roots they had been sleeping hewn into fragments by the glistening blade of the axe which the angry storm was wielding. For a moment they gazed on each other with mute horror, then, as with one voice, exclaimed, "Where's Ned?"