That afternoon Spider took his flowers and a note-book over to the hotel, where a large case of mounted specimens is exhibited, and spent two hours identifying them, and listing the names in his note-book, with his specimens pressed between the leaves. Bennie bought some candy, and a bunch of post-cards, and scribbled messages to his mother and father and friends. Finally he came over to Spider.
“Gee whiz, you’re a studious one,” he said. “Wish I was. How do you get that way?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t help being interested in birds and plants and things like that. You’ve just got to find something you’re awfully interested in, I guess.”
“Well, I’m interested in mountains, but that won’t get me any merit badge. I’m gettin’ kind of interested in supper about now, too. What say we beat it over to camp?”
They walked back along the rim. The snow cap on Garfield was growing pink behind them, and the lake below, ruffled by a little wind, was like a wrinkled carpet of vivid ultramarine blue. The trail, they heard, was now dug out all the way to the landing. Rested by the quiet afternoon, they felt keen for fresh adventures.
“I feel’s if I could walk all the way around this old rim,” Bennie declared. “You know, there’s a motor road runs around it, only it’s full of snow now. Has to cut down behind Dutton Cliffs and Garfield, way down to the road we came up on. But the rest of the way round it’s up on the rim. Uncle Bill says it’s about thirty or thirty-five miles around, he thinks, by the road. Bet you we could do it in a day, right over the old snow. That ought to help toward a merit badge for hiking.”
“I’d rather row around the lake at the base of the cliffs,” said Spider.
“Well, let’s do that tomorrow. Shall we?”
“I guess we’ll do what the rest do. Your uncle will have something good on, sure.”
“Hope so, I need the exercise,” Bennie laughed, plunging across the snow-drift toward the tents.