The flume was a cleft not more than eight feet wide, between two great ledges of moss-grown rock. It ran back into the hill two hundred feet, and was at least thirty feet deep. The brook came into the upper end over a series of waterfalls, and ran out of the lower end, where the boys were, down another fall. Frank took a picture of it, and then they crossed the brook at the lower end, and followed the path up along the top. The path brought them into another logging road, which presently came out into a level clearing. As they had not seen the top of the mountain since they entered the woods, everybody gave a gasp now. There, ahead of them, was the summit--but looking just as high, just as far off, as ever! Art pulled out his watch. “We’ve been going an hour and a quarter--whew!” he said. “I thought we were ’most there.” “A little bigger than it looks, eh?” Mr. Rogers laughed. “Most mountains fool you that way.” The party plodded on a way across the level plateau, and then the ascent began again--up, up, up, by a path which had evidently once been a logging road, but had now been eroded by the water, till it was little better than the dry bed of a brook--and not always dry at that. The boys began to pant, and mop their foreheads. Then they began to shift their blanket rolls from one shoulder to the other. The pace had slowed down. “How about that mile an hour being ridiculously slow, Art?” Mr. Rogers inquired. “We’re not doing much better, that’s a fact,” Art admitted. Just as he spoke, a partridge suddenly went up from the path, not twenty-five feet ahead, with a great whir-r-r. When they reached the spot where he rose, they found a tiny, clear spring. Art flung down his burden, and dropped on his knees with his cup. “Good place for lunch, _I_ say,” remarked Peanut. “Me, too, on that,” said Frank. Rob looked ahead. The path was growing still steeper. He looked back, and through the trees he could see far below to the valley. “One more vote,” he said. “Carried,” said Art, running for fuel. After a lunch of bacon and powdered eggs, the party lolled an hour in the shade, half asleep, and then resumed the climb. The path very soon entered a forest of a different sort. It was still chiefly hard wood, but very much darker and denser than that below. The trail, too, was not a logging road. It was marked only by blazes on the trees, and the forest floor was black and damp with untold ages of leaf-mould. “I guess we’ve got above the line of lumbering,” said Rob. “We have,” said the Scout Master. Art looked about. “Then this is really primeval forest!” he exclaimed--“just what it was when there were only Indians in this country!” He investigated the trees more carefully. “Why, most of them are birches,” he cried, “but they are so old and green with moss that they don’t look white at all. And look how short they are, for such big trunks.”