CHAPTER XV
With Rob, Art and Peanut Into the Great Gulf
Rob, Art and Peanut were making time down the head wall, but they were also using up shoe leather, for the wall of the Great Gulf is composed of innumerable loose stones, often of a shaly nature, with sharp edges, which turn under the foot. The head wall trail, too, because of its steepness, is not so much used as many others, and at times the Scouts had some difficulty in keeping it. It grew warmer as they descended out of the breeze into the still air of the Gulf, and, as Peanut said, his forehead was starting another brook. They reached timber line in a short time, and before long were in the woods beside Spaulding Lake, where in spite of the leaf-mould on the bottom they paused long enough to strip and have a quick bath in the cold water, which was, however, warm by contrast with some of the brooks they had tried. Then they resumed the trail down the floor of the Gulf, beside the head waters of the Peabody River. The path was rough, full of roots and wet places, and it descended constantly, with waterfalls beside it, and through openings in the trees here and there glimpses of the great cliff walls of Jefferson and Adams to the left. The thrushes were singing all about them, and they came upon several deer tracks, and once upon the mark of a bear’s paw in the mud. They kept looking, too, for the Gulf camp, but it did not appear.
“Say, this old trail is longer than I thought,” said Peanut, “or else there isn’t any Gulf camp.”
At last, however, after nearly an hour’s tramping from Spaulding Lake, they saw smoke through the trees ahead, and came upon the camp, which was a lean-to like that in Tuckerman’s, with the opening placed close up against the perpendicular wall of a big boulder, to throw the heat of the fire back into the shelter.
Two young men, badly in need of shaves, were cooking breakfast.
“Hello, Scouts,” they said.
“Lunching early, aren’t you?” asked Rob.
The men laughed. “This is breakfast,” they said. “We decided to-day to have a good sleep, and we did, all right—thirteen hours! Came over Crawford’s and down the head wall yesterday. Going out to Carter’s Notch to-day. Where are you going?”
“We are bound up the Six Husbands to the Madison Hut,” the boys answered.