Page:Boy scouts in the White Mountains; the story of a long hike (IA boyscoutsinwhite00eato).pdf/277

 *stantly, with waterfalls beside it, and through openings in the trees here and there glimpses of the great cliff walls of Jefferson and Adams to the left. The thrushes were singing all about them, and they came upon several deer tracks, and once upon the mark of a bear's paw in the mud. They kept looking, too, for the Gulf camp, but it did not appear.

"Say, this old trail is longer than I thought," said Peanut, "or else there isn't any Gulf camp."

At last, however, after nearly an hour's tramping from Spaulding Lake, they saw smoke through the trees ahead, and came upon the camp, which was a lean-to like that in Tuckerman's, with the opening placed close up against the perpendicular wall of a big boulder, to throw the heat of the fire back into the shelter.

Two young men, badly in need of shaves, were cooking breakfast.

"Hello, Scouts," they said.

"Lunching early, aren't you?" asked Rob.

The men laughed. "This is breakfast," they said. "We decided to-day to have a good sleep, and we did, all right—thirteen hours! Came over Crawford's and down the head wall yesterday. Going out to Carter's Notch to-day. Where are you going?"

"We are bound up the Six Husbands to the Madison Hut," the boys answered.