Each boy, then, got a third of a slice of bread, and a tiny morsel of ham. On this they put their chunk of emergency rations, softened with the last of the water from the canteens, and began to eat. Nobody seemed to be enjoying the food very much, but their expressions grew less pained the longer they chewed. “Beats all how long you can chew this before it disappears,” said Lou. “Gets sweeter, too.” “Maybe that’s the bread. Bread almost turns to sugar if you chew and chew it without swallowing,” said Rob. “But this pemmican stuff certainly is filling.” “What’s it made of?” Lou asked. “Rats and rubber boots,” said Peanut. Mr. Rogers laughed. “Not exactly--put on your shirt, Peanut,” he said. “Pemmican was originally made of dried venison, pounded up with fat and berries. Now it’s made of dried beef pounded up with dried fruits and fats, and packed into a jelly cake to harden. That’s about what this is, I fancy. It’s very nourishing.” “All right, but where’s the sweet chocolate?” Peanut demanded. Rob passed out the chocolate for dessert, and after it was eaten, everybody began to complain of being thirsty. The canteens were empty. “There’s a spring just below the summit,” said one of the three strangers. “You mean there _was_,” laughed a second. “You drank it all dry on the way up.” “Let’s get there on the way down before he does,” cried Peanut. “No fear,” the first speaker laughed, “we are going down over the ridge, the way you just came up. We’re doing Moosilauke to-morrow.” “By the Beaver Brook Trail?” the boys asked. “Yes. Have you been over it? How is it?” “It ain’t,” said Peanut. “It was, but it ain’t.” “What do you mean?” “He means it’s eroded into pretty steep drops in places,” Rob put in. “We thought when we came down that it would be an awful pull up.” “There’s a good logging road across the brook, though,” one of the men said. “If you’d taken that instead of the trail you’d have had no trouble. I was over it last year.” “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.