They lifted Bob’s crimson canoe from the rack under the trees, dropped it over the side of the float, and tumbled in. Then each took a paddle and made the craft fairly fly. At the landing by the bridge they pulled it out of the water and set off along the Pine Hill road through the tiny village and along the edge of a sloping meadow that skirts Humpback Mountain. Presently the cliff was in sight, rising sheer from the meadow to a height of some seventy feet. From the side it looked for all the world as though a giant had sliced a piece off the end of the mountain as one might cut the end from a loaf of bread, and had left the crumbs in the shape of big and little boulders piled up at the bottom. From the top of the cliff the ground sloped gradually for a ways and then sprang abruptly upward into the oddly shaped cone that lent the mountain its name. Their first view of the cliff gave them no sight of the face, and it was another minute’s walk before they could see the daubs of bright red paint that adorned it. There, staring down at them across the field, was the legend: CAMP WICKASAW, ’04 But, after all, the reality was not so bad as what Rooke had described. The letters were _not_ three feet high, and even an eagle would have experienced difficulty in reading them a quarter of a mile away. But it was bad enough, and Dan and Bob scowled wrathfully. Then they climbed the fence and set off across the meadow to get a nearer view. Presently they reached a sort of terrace of tumbled boulders and stones, some of them crumbling and some as impregnable as when they had fallen, which was banked up under the cliff. Bushes and weeds had grown up between them, and it was all the two could do to thrust themselves through; and when, after a minute or two, they had gained the edge of the towering mass of rock their legs and arms were scratched and their jerseys and trunks torn. “Phew!” said Bob, looking ruefully at his wounds, “that’s a merry place to come through, isn’t it? I hope those Wickasaws got as much as we did!” Above them the cliff arose at a steep angle for some twenty feet, and from there sprang almost straight into air. That first twenty feet could be climbed in places if one used care, and it was evident that the Wickasaw fellows had climbed it. “Probably two of them went up there,” said Bob, “and one sort of steadied the other while he painted. But it was a risky thing to do.” “Pshaw,” answered Dan, “that wasn’t very hard. The trouble is, they’ve got their old patent-medicine sign up as high as any one can reach. And it will be mighty hard work to paint it out, besides taking a whole lot of paint.” “That’s so,” said Bob, craning his head back to look. “But it’s got to be done somehow.” Dan was silent for a moment; then, “No, it hasn’t, either!” he exclaimed suddenly. “What do you mean?” “Why, what we want to do isn’t to paint out their sign, but to paint our own above it; see?” “Yes, but how? Use ladders?”