“Heaven knows what would have become of us if they hadn’t heard our shout!” the uninjured woman exclaimed, again close to tears. “We were lost, and Bessie was hurt, and we’d have perished!”
“Not so bad as that,” the doctor said, with a smile, “because the cloud cleared, and you’d have found the path, and we four would have come by just the same.”
Peanut’s face clouded. He had thought of himself and his two companions as rescuers, and here the doctor was proving that if they hadn’t done it, somebody else would! The doctor evidently guessed his thoughts, for he added:
“That’s not taking away any credit from these Scouts, though. If we hadn’t happened to be headed for Washington you would undoubtedly have been in bad trouble, and if the cloud had lasted longer, you might have been in for a night on the mountain without shelter, and that never did anybody any good. Pretty good work for the boys, I think!”
Peanut looked happy again, and the two parties shouted goodbye to each other, as those with the stretcher moved down the trail toward the distant railroad trestle, and the Scouts moved northward, toward the Madison Hut.
Then Peanut suddenly realized that he was tired. He was more than tired—he could just about drag one foot after the other. Art was not much fresher, and even Rob said if anybody should ask him to run fifty yards, he’d shoot ’em.
They passed the Six Husbands’ Trail, swung around north of Jefferson onto the knife-blade col between that mountain and Adams, passing Dingmaul Rock, a strange shaped boulder called after a mountain animal which is never seen except by guides when they have been having a drop too much. Peanut laughed at this, but he grew sober and silent again when it was passed, and when the trail swung to the left of Adams, rising over the slope between Adams and the lesser western spur called Sam Adams, he didn’t even grin when somebody suggested that they climb Adams, which is 5,805 feet, the second highest mountain in New England.
“Go to thunder,” was his only comment.
Once they had toiled up the slope, however, they looked down-hill all the way to the Madison Hut, and in thirty minutes they had crossed the Adams-Madison col and reached the stone hut tucked into the rocks at the base of the cone of Madison, the last peak of the Presidential range.
With one accord, packs and blankets were dropped off weary shoulders to the ground, and the three Scouts who had been into the Gulf that day flopped down on top of them, and lay there exhausted. The other three had already been to the hut and left their load.