So he crawled out of his blanket as gently as he could, and tried to make no noise as he put on more fuel. He blew on the coals till the new wood caught, and then turned his cold back to the flames. As he did so, he saw Spider’s eyes open in the sudden light. Spider blinked a second, and then sat up.
“Hello,” he whispered. “You cold?”
“Gosh, I was most frozen,” Bennie whispered back.
“Me, too. Been sleeping on a rock, right in the middle of my hip. Ow, it’s sore!”
Spider now got up also, and came close to the fire.
When they were warmed up again, they lay down once more, and managed to doze off. But long before morning, Bennie woke to see first Mr. Stone and then his uncle putting more wood on the fire. It wasn’t yet dawn—just the first hint of lightness in the sky—when Bennie finally woke up so cold and so stiff and uncomfortable from the hard ground, that further sleep seemed impossible. He was just rousing himself to put on more wood when he heard Spider stir, and then sit up.
“I’m going to stay up,” he whispered. “Let’s take a trot around to get warm.”
Spider rose, and after building up the fire and huddling over it a few minutes, they walked away from camp.
“Let’s go up the valley to the rim,” Spider said. “We can go on the rim road, and have easy walking. Gee, I’d like to run all the way, and get up some circulation.”
They set out rapidly, and reached the rim in fifteen minutes. It was lighter now, and they could see plainly. The lake at this point was only 500 feet below them, for they had come out on the lowest point on the entire rim. But, even so, they seemed to be looking down into the clouds. They looked up into clouds, too, whole masses of clouds around the peak of Scott, of Dutton Cliff, of Garfield. Then the daylight increased rapidly, the clouds began mysteriously to disappear, holes came in them showing the blue water—and suddenly Spider grabbed Bennie’s arm and pointed half-way down the side.