None of the boys ever had.
“Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” said the Scout Master. “I’m going to see if Mr. Goodwin has the book, and read it to you. How would you like to take to-morrow off, and climb up to his forehead, and read the story there, and then go over to the Crawford House by train, instead of hiking the twenty-five miles over, on a motor road full of dust?”
“Hooray! Me for that!” cried Peanut.
“Me, too!” cried the rest of the Scouts.
“Well, we’ll do it, if I can borrow the book,” said Mr. Rogers. “Now, back to make a camp!”
At the depot the boys shouldered their packs again, and Mr. Rogers directed them to go north up the road till they came to Echo Lake.
“Leave your packs at the little store,” he said, “and go down to the boat house and get the man to take you out in a launch. I’ll get a shave and meet you there.”
The Scouts set off up the road, and the Scout Master went into the hotel. When he had been shaved, he followed up the road, and as he drew near Echo Lake, a beautiful little pond at the foot of a great cliff just north of Eagle Cliff, he heard the long-drawn note of a bugle floating out over the water, and echoing back from the cliff. He called the boys in from the landing.
“Oh, that’s lovely!” Lou exclaimed. “The sound just seems to float back, as if somebody was up on top of the cliff with another bugle, answering you!”
They paid the boatman and went back to the little store, where the boys had already consumed two sodas apiece, and Peanut had bought two pounds of candy. From there they went still farther north up the road, and suddenly plunged down a path to the left, into a ravine, with a brook at the bottom, and in among a grove of gigantic hemlocks.