“I’m glad we didn’t,” Art said--“at least as long as we were coming down.”
Both parties now packed up their loads, took a last good look at the view, with Washington still under the clouds, and said good-bye, the three strangers going off down the ridge, the Scouts turning northwest, and winding down the summit cone, over the rough, broken stones of the path. At the base of the cone, they found the spring, a small, shallow basin in the stones, so shallow that the water had to be dipped gingerly to keep from stirring up the bottom. By the time the last boy had drunk his fill, in fact, there wasn’t enough water left to dip. Then the path turned due west, and descended at a more gradual angle, still over small, flat, sharp fragments of stone, toward a little pond in a hollow of the mountain’s shoulder, just below the line where the dwarf trees stopped entirely.
They were soon on a level with this lake, which is called Eagle Lake, but the path was two or three hundred feet south of it, and to get in to it meant fighting through tough dwarf spruce and other verdure, only waist high, but as good as a wire fence. They stuck to the trail, which led through this dwarf vegetation almost on a level for some distance, then actually began to go up-hill again, on to the west shoulder of the mountain.
“Oh, rats!” cried Peanut. “I’ve gone up enough to-day!”
“Heroes need sleep, just the same,” Peanut retorted.
The ascent, however, was not for long. Soon they swung northwest again, entered timber at last, and began to descend rapidly. After a mile or so on this tack, the timber growing ever taller, they brought up against the end of Eagle Cliff, which rose straight up in front of them. Here the path swung west again, and began its final plunge to the Profile House. It was a good, generous path through the woods. In years gone by it used to be a bridle path, for people ascended Lafayette on horseback.
“I’d hate to be the horse, though,” Peanut said, as he put his pole ahead of him, and cleared six feet at a jump.
It was, indeed, a steep path, and they came down it at a high rate of speed.
“Gee, we go up about a mile an hour, and we come down about six!” Art exclaimed, catching a tree beside the path to stop himself.