There were other important things for boys to think about besides fun and tobogganing; it was just the right sort of weather to begin making maple sugar. For when it freezes hard, then thaws, the sap will run; so up near the lumber camps, where Dick and Joe lived, the sugar season was commencing. Several miles beyond the camps upon the side of a wild mountain, rightly called Lone Mountain, grew a great forest of maples. The spot was too far away for most of the campers to bother about sugar making, but Dick and Joe did not mind distances, and as all the spending money which the boys had they were expected to earn for themselves, they were only too glad to have the privilege of tapping the maples on Lone Mountain. Even before the sap began to flow, they had actually counted over the money they would earn with their sugar and had really spent almost every cent. They whittled out hundreds of fine ash spills to run the sap, then borrowed every crock and pail their mother could spare from the camp to hold it, besides two great black iron kettles, which they would set over an arch built of large flat stones, where they would boil their syrup. After packing provisions and all their outfit upon a sledge, off they started for Lone Mountain, a day's journey from camp. Wild and lonely enough was Lone Mountain, a kind of scary spot at best for two boys to camp out alone, but they were not at all afraid, for they were used to wild places: having lived so long in the great spruce forests they felt quite at home. Several years before, they had found the remains of an old sugar house standing in the maple grove on the mountain below a great overhanging crag. Here they would live, and boil the sap outside the shack. After tapping their trees, they drove in the spills, hanging the buckets beneath. As fast as the sap collected they had to boil it, or it would soon sour and be wasted. So, as you can well imagine, both boys were kept very busy, collecting sap, keeping up fires under the great iron kettles, watching the boiling sugar, and testing it upon the snow to find out when it was boiled enough. When night came they were very tired, but they kept at their sugar making as long as the sap continued to run from the trees. They had been on Lone Mountain over a week. With the continued thawings and freezing, the sap kept on running, and the boys were glad, for it meant a fine lot of sugar and they were greatly elated over their good luck. They would carry back more sugar to camp than ever before. "If we can only have two days more like to-day's run of sap, we'd make a pile of money this year," spoke Dick happily; "we could buy two fine overcoats, and have something toward our new sugaring outfit that we talked with father about buying." "Yes, I know; great!" replied Joe, as he ladled out a great waxy spoonful of amber sugar upon a pan of snow, and after it had cooled a bit divided it with Dick.