“Oh, John, don’t!” cried the girl, as if she was going to weep again.
“Well, I call it some adventure!” Peanut cried. “Gee, I’ll bet we’ll all talk about it when we get home! Mr. Rogers had me scared, all right, way back on Clinton, talking about storms and——” (here Peanut, who was about to say “people killed in ’em,” caught Rob’s eye in warning, and added instead) “—— and things. When the clouds hit us, my heart came up into my mouth, and then went down into my boots like a busted elevator, and I got kind of cold all over. I can see how, if I’d been alone, that would have knocked the legs out from under me, all right. But there was Mr. Rogers keeping the trail, so I just plugged along—and here we are! Say, I’m going out in the snow! Snow in July! Hooray! Come on, Art!”
Peanut and Art opened the narrow slit of a door wrapping their blankets close about them while Mr. Rogers shouted to them not to go out of sight of the cabin, and stood outside in the icy cloud. Rob, watching them through the window, saw them scooping the thin layer of snow off a rock, and moulding it into a snowball apiece, which they threw at each other. He could see their mouths opening, as if they were shouting, but the howling of the gale drowned all sound. A few minutes later they came in again, their faces and hands red.
“Say, it’s cold out there!” cried Art, “but the wind is going down a bit, I think, and it looks lighter in the north.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if it cleared up in an hour,” said Mr. Rogers, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if we had to stay here all night.”
“All night!” cried the girl. “Oh, John, we’ve got to get down to-night. Oh, where will mother think we are! They’ll know we were in the storm, too, and worry. Oh, dear!”
She began to sob again, and the man endeavored to comfort her.
“Come, come!” said Mr. Rogers, rather sternly, “you’ve got to make the best of a bad bargain. If we can get to the Summit House later in the day, you can telephone down to the base. Where are your family?”
“They were at Fabyans,” the man answered. “We were all going to Bethlehem this afternoon, after the train got down the mountain. You see, Miss Brown and I wanted to walk up the Crawford Bridle Path, and catch the train down. We started very early. A friend of ours walked it last summer in three hours and a half.”
“Some walking!” said Peanut.