Peanut picked himself up sleepily, and hunted his tooth-brush out of his pack. “Oh, very well!” he said, starting down to the brook for his morning wash. “Only it would be nice one day just to lie around in camp, and do nothing.”
“We’ll do just that, when we get to the Great Gulf, or Tuckerman’s Ravine, perhaps,” said Mr. Rogers. “But not to-day. Besides, we’re going to get a motor ride this afternoon.”
It was after seven o’clock before camp was struck. They left everything packed and ready to put aboard the motor after lunch, and armed only with a small package of raisins apiece, which Mr. Rogers had mysteriously produced from his pack, and the last of the sweet chocolate, and with their staffs and canteens, and the book, they set off.
“Seems good to be going light,” somebody remarked.
“It does that,” said Art. “Let’s whoop it up this morning. By the way, we haven’t cut our mileage for two days.”
“We can do it at lunch,” said Peanut. “Won’t take us long to eat what we’ve got. That’s a lead pipe. Say, Mr. Rogers, did you have those raisins yesterday?”
“You’ll never know!” the Scout Master laughed.
The path up Cannon Mountain (which, by the way, is called Cannon Mountain because a rock on what looks like the summit from the Profile House resembles a cannon) started in near the hotel, and lost no time about ascending. It began to go up with the first step, in fact, through an evergreen forest, and it never stopped going up till it emerged from the evergreens upon bare rock, two miles away, directly across the Notch from the point on Lafayette where the path reaches the end of Eagle Cliff.
“Looks as if you could almost throw a stone across,” said Peanut.
The boys now saw that the real summit of Cannon was a mile away to the west, and instead of looking down, as they had expected to do, upon the top of Bridal Veil falls on the west side, where their real mountain trip had begun, they were a long distance from the falls. The Old Man lay to the south of them, and it was toward him they made their way, standing presently on top of the precipice above his massive forehead, and looking southward through the Notch. What a view it was! The ground below their feet fell sheer away out of sight, fifteen hundred feet to the valley below. To the right was the great wall of Kinsman, to the left the bare scarred ridges of Lafayette, Lincoln, Haystack and Liberty, along which they had plodded the day before. In the green Notch between they could see the white road and the little Pemigewassett River flashing through the trees, on their way to the Flume House, and far off, where the Notch opened out into the sunny distances, the town of North Woodstock. Beyond the opening, the boys could see the far blue mountains to the south.