“How far have we got to go?” asked Frank.
“Seven or eight miles,” Mr. Rogers answered, “if we want to camp at the base of Kinsman. If you’d rather walk it in the morning, we can camp along this road.”
“No, let’s get there to-night! Don’t care if I starve, I’m going to keep on till I see the mountains,” cried Peanut.
The rest were equally eager, so up the road they plodded, a road which mounted steadily through second growth timber, mile after mile, with scarce a house on it. After an hour or more, they came in sight of Sugar Hill village, one street of houses straggling up a hill ahead. They increased their pace, and soon Peanut, who was leading, gave a cry which startled several people walking on the sidewalk. The rest hurried up. Peanut had come to the top of the road, and was looking off eastward excitedly. There were the mountains! Near at hand, hardly a stone’s throw, it seemed, across the valley below, lay a long, forest-clad bulwark, rising into domes. Beyond that shot up a larger rampart, sharply peaked, of naked rock. Off to the left, beyond that, growing bluer and bluer into the distance, was a billowing sea of mountains, and very far off, to the northwest, almost like a mist on the horizon, lay the biggest pyramid of all, which Mr. Rogers told them was Mount Washington.
“Some mountains, those!” Peanut exclaimed. “Gee, I guess we won’t climb ’em all in two weeks!”
They turned to the right now, passing a big hotel on the very crest of the hill, and as they passed, the setting sun behind them turned all the mountains a bright amethyst, so that they looked, as Lou put it, “like great big jewels.”
“It’s beautiful!” he added, enthusiastically.
“Make a poem about it,” said Peanut. “Say, Mr. Rogers, Lou writes poetry. You oughter read it! He wrote a poem to Lucy Parker one day, didn’t you, Lou?”
“Well, if I could write poetry, this view would make me do it, all right,” Rob put in. “Now where to, Mr. Rogers?”
“Well, in an hour we’ll be at camp. All down-hill, too.”
“Hooray!” cried Art. “This pack is getting heavy.”
The party now turned sharply down the hill toward the east, and the great double range of the Franconia Mountains, which Mr. Rogers named for them. The highest peak on the north of the farther range was Lafayette, 5,200 feet high. The northern peak of the first range was Cannon Mountain, the Old Man’s face being on the farther side of it. To the south the twin summits, like a saddleback, were the two peaks of Kinsman, which they would climb in the morning. As they dropped rapidly down the hill, they suddenly saw to the south, in the fading light, a huge bulk of a mountain filling up the vista. “That’s Moosilauke,” Mr. Rogers said. “We tackle him day after to-morrow.”