Bennie turned back to the title page, and Spider read, “On British Crags and Alpine Heights.”
“Say, wait a minute—look at this picture,” said Bennie, turning the pages to find it. “Here it is. Look at that old cliff! And pipe where that guy is climbing. Oh, boy! That’s only one, too. ’Most every picture’s like that, or more exciting, and it tells how somebody fell off most of ’em, and was killed, and——”
“Silence!” from Miss Lizzie Cox.
“Old crab!” whispered Bennie. “Well, I gotter finish this chapter ’fore closing time.”
“Why don’t you take the book out? I’d like to read it, too,” Spider whispered.
“Haven’t got a card,” Bennie confessed. “Guess I don’t read as much as I ought to.”
“Guess you don’t,” said Spider. “Here, give it to me. I’ll take it out for you.”
“How’d you ever know about it, anyhow?” he asked, when they were outside the building, on the snowy sidewalk. “Gave me some shock to see you sitting in the library!”
“Mr. Rogers told me about it,” Bennie answered. “We got to talking about mountains, and climbing, and he said to go ask for this book and see what real climbing is like. Oh, boy! I wish we had something like those old what d’you call ’ems—spitzes—around these diggings.”
“A spitz being what?” Spider laughed.