The descent was more rapid, and even more exciting, than the climb. They used the doubled rope, pulling it down to them after they had made a fifty foot descent (the rope was a hundred feet long), and speedily reaching the traverse.
Here Bennie and Spider offered to let either Tom or Billy carry the rope across to make the railing, but both of them said, “Not on your life!” in one voice, and most decidedly. So Spider took it across, and when everybody was over, Bennie tied one end around the tree, tossed the rope down the gully the full hundred feet, and told the rest to slide down it.
“How you going to get down?” Tom asked.
“You’ll see.”
When the last man was down, Bennie doubled the rope around the tree, and slid on the two strands till he reached a laurel bush in the gully. There he hung on, pulled his rope down, slipped it around the bush, and came the rest of the way, in a shower of snow.
Fifteen minutes later they were down again at their snowshoes, and as they put them on and tramped out across the fields away from the mountain they looked back up at the cliffs, rising sheer and naked toward the blue sky.
“Doesn’t seem as if we could have got up there, does it?” Bennie cried.
“Now it’s all over, seems as if it was great sport,” Billy laughed. “But while you’re doing it—say, I wasn’t thinking of much but keeping hold of that old rope!”
“That’s a very good thing to think of, too,” said the scout master. “Boys, I want you to promise me one thing, on your honor as scouts. That’s dangerous work, especially at this time of year. I want you to promise me you won’t try to take any of the other, smaller boys up there. We don’t want any nasty accident in our troop. Will you?”
“We promise,” they all said, soberly.