“Looks as if it had never been lumbered,” said Art. “Wow! look at the size of those maples and beeches!”
“The paper men don’t want hard wood, thank goodness,” Mr. Rogers answered. “We’ll get about a mile of this.”
They soon found a spring beside the path, and under the shadows of the great trees they made a fire and cooked lunch. Then, for an hour, everybody rested, lying on his back and listening to the beautiful songs of the hermit thrushes. Peanut and Art and Frank went to sleep, while Lou and Rob and Mr. Rogers talked softly. It was a lazy, peaceful hour, up there in the great forest. At two o’clock Rob beat a tattoo on his frying-pan, to wake up the sleepers, and ordered the march to begin.
For the next two hours it was steady plodding. The Benton Path, by which they were climbing, was clear and good. They came out of the hard timber forest in a little over half an hour, into slash land, now growing up into scraggly woods, full of vines and brambles, and presently the path wound to the edge of a steep ravine, where they could look down at the tumbling waterfalls of the brook they had swum in that morning, and across the ravine to the stripped northern shoulders. The second hour of climbing was merely monotonous ascent, toilsome and slow, with no view at all. They had now put four miles below them, and the signs of lumbering ceased. They were getting close to timber line, where the stunted spruces were not worth cutting. For a little way the path grew less steep, and they quickened their pace. The trees were now no higher than bushes. They saw the summit ahead, though the house seemed to have disappeared; and the view opened out. Westward they could see to the Green Mountains, and beyond the Green Mountains, like a blue haze, the Adirondacks. At their feet they began to notice tiny mountain cranberry vines. Peanut tasted one of the half ripe cranberries, puckered up his face, and spit it hastily out. The path grew steep again. The trees vanished. The way grew rocky, with cranberries between the rocks everywhere. At last only the final heave to the summit seemed to confront them. Peanut, forgetting his lame heel, panted up ahead, and emitted a cry of disappointment.
“Gee whiz,” he shouted back, “there’s the Summit House a quarter of a mile away!”
“You’ll learn yet that you’re never on the top of a mountain till you get there,” Mr. Rogers laughed.
But this final quarter mile was nearly level—or seemed so after the steep climb—and they were soon at the Summit House, with the view spread out to all four parts of the compass.
What a view it was! But all the boys concentrated their gaze in one direction—northeast. There, thirty miles or more away, over the top of the Lafayette range, they saw Mount Washington again, for the first time since the first Sugar Hill view, saw even the Summit House on its cone. That was the final goal of their hike—the high spot—and beside it all the billowing sea of blue mountain tops between paled to insignificance.
“She looks a long way off!” said Art.
“And me with a blister,” sighed Peanut. “But it’s Pike’s Peak—I mean Washington—or bust!”