They got out of the motor beside the hotel, and thanked the chauffeur for their trip. They had come twenty-seven miles farther on their way since two o’clock, and it was not yet four!
“Now,” said Mr. Rogers, when the car had turned back home, “the Crawford Bridle Path starts right here in these woods across from the hotel. That’s it, there. I move we tote our stuff up it far enough to make camp, and then take a walk down into the Notch.”
“Second the motion,” said Frank.
Picking up their burdens, the boys walked a quarter of a mile eastward, by a beaten path that ascended at a comfortable angle, not far from a brook. Presently they found a pool in the brook, hid their stuff in the bushes fifty feet from the path, and hurried back to the Crawford House.
Just below the hotel and the railroad station was a small pond.
“That pond,” the Scout Master said, “is the head waters of the Saco River. We are on a divide. Behind the hotel, the springs flow north into the Ammonoosuc, and thence into the Connecticut. They empty, finally, you see, into Long Island Sound. The water of this lake empties into the Atlantic north of Portland, Maine. Yet they start within two hundred yards of each other.”
Just south of the little pond, the boys noticed a bare, rocky cliff, perhaps a hundred feet high, rising sharp from the left side of the road. The top was rounded off.
“Look!” said Lou. “That cliff is just like an elephant’s head, with his trunk coming down to the road!”
Mr. Rogers laughed. “They call it the Elephant’s Head,” he said. “You’re not the first to discover the resemblance.”
When they had passed the Elephant’s Head, they saw that the gate of the Notch was, in reality, not wide enough to admit both the carriage road and the railroad. The railroad, on their right, entered through a gap blasted in the solid rock. A few steps more, and they were in the gate themselves, and the wonderful panorama burst upon them.