Page:Boy scouts in the White Mountains; the story of a long hike (IA boyscoutsinwhite00eato).pdf/290

 stretcher moved down the trail toward the distant railroad trestle, and the Scouts moved northward, toward the Madison Hut.

Then Peanut suddenly realized that he was tired. He was more than tired—he could just about drag one foot after the other. Art was not much fresher, and even Rob said if anybody should ask him to run fifty yards, he'd shoot 'em.

They passed the Six Husbands' Trail, swung around north of Jefferson onto the knife-blade col between that mountain and Adams, passing Dingmaul Rock, a strange shaped boulder called after a mountain animal which is never seen except by guides when they have been having a drop too much. Peanut laughed at this, but he grew sober and silent again when it was passed, and when the trail swung to the left of Adams, rising over the slope between Adams and the lesser western spur called Sam Adams, he didn't even grin when somebody suggested that they climb Adams, which is 5,805 feet, the second highest mountain in New England.

"Go to thunder," was his only comment.

Once they had toiled up the slope, however, they looked down-hill all the way to the Madison Hut, and in thirty minutes they had crossed the Adams-Madison col and reached the stone hut tucked into the rocks at the base of the cone of Madison, the last peak of the Presidential range.