“What do you think—on second thought, Peanut?” asked the Scout Master.
“Well, we’re taking a dinner from Mr. Goodwin, ain’t we?”
“Yes,” said Art, “but that’s different. We helped save his silver and stuff. And it’s just in his family. Up there at the hotel, there’d be a crowd around—women, and things. Looks kind of as if we were trying to get into the lime-light.”
“Guess you’re right,” Peanut replied. “Come on, then, and show us the Old Man of the Mountain, Mr. Rogers. But ain’t there a place where we can buy a drink?”
“We’ll find one—after we’ve seen the face,” the Scout Master laughed. He looked at his watch. “After four, boys,” he added. “We’ve got to get a camp ready, and spruce up before dinner, and I’ve got to go to the hotel and get a shave.”
They stepped up from the railroad station to the road. Directly before them was the Profile House, a large wooden hotel, facing south. Behind it rose the steep wall of Cannon Mountain, and south of it, on the lowest terrace of the slope, was a double row of cottages, ending, on a bend, with a group including Mr. Goodwin’s. Behind the boys, back where they had come, they could see the first steep, wooded slope of Lafayette, and to the north the great rocky precipice of Eagle Cliff. Looking south again, the road disappeared between the landslides of Lafayette on the one hand, and the wall of Cannon on the other, a narrow notch, not much wider than the road itself. The opening where the boys stood was only large enough to hold the hotel and cottages, and three or four tennis courts, on which a crowd was playing.
The party went south down the road, Peanut and Art pointing out Mr. Goodwin’s house, and the track taken by the burglars, and quickly left the houses behind. After a quarter of a mile or so, the woods opened out ahead, and presently the boys stood in a place where the road was enlarged to the left into a semicircle, and in that semicircle a team or a motor could stop for the view.
“It’s the place!” cried Peanut. “Here’s where they left the car! And those are the bushes we crawled into, Art!”
“And there’s the Old Man of the Mountain,” said Mr. Rogers.
The Scouts followed his finger. Looking through an opening in the trees across the road, toward the southwest, they saw first a beautiful little lake, so still that it mirrored every reflection, and then, rising directly out of the woods beyond this lake a huge cliff, curved at first, but gradually attaining the perpendicular till it shot up like the side of a house, fifteen hundred feet into the air. At the very top of it, looking southward down the valley, was, indeed, the Old Man of the Mountain—a huge knob of rock thrust forth from the pinnacle of the precipice, and shaped precisely like a human profile, with sunken eye under a brow like Daniel Webster’s, sharp nose, firm mouth, and, as Mr. Rogers said, “quite literally a granite chin.”