e Hoover
would feel then."

"Oh, well, there's no use thinking about it, Dolly. It won't ever
happen. So I shan't be disappointed, anyhow."

"Well, it might happen and I think it's simply great to dream about
things that might happen to you. It doesn't do any harm, and it's
awfully good fun."

"You do the dreaming, Dolly, and tell me about your dreams. You can do
it better than I could. I'm no good at dreaming that way at all."

"All right, that's a bargain. And right now I guess we'd better stop
thinking about dreams and attend to pathfinding. Here's a turn. Which
way ought we to go?"

"Straight ahead, I'm sure," said Bessie. "See how the trail narrows in
the other direction, and it doesn't look as if it had ever been made
like the main trail. It's more as if people had just broken through
one after another, until a sort of trail was made."

"Yes, and it isn't straight ahead, either. When there's a big tree in
the way, the trail goes around it, and on the regular trail the guides
went along a straight line and chopped down trees when they had to."

"All right. Give me the hatchet, and I'll mark the proper way to go."

Deftly Bessie, who had had long practice in the use of a hatchet when
she lived with the Hoovers, cut off a strip of bark on a tree at the
meeting point of the two trails, so that it formed a plain and
unmistakable guide to anyone who knew anything at all of woodcraft.

Then they pressed on. They walked fast, and, with nothing to delay
them, they made good time, pausing only once in a while to take a sip
from their water bottles.

"I can't hear the girls singing any more, can you?" asked Dolly,
presently.

"No," said Bessie, pausing to listen. "I guess we must be quite a
little way ahead of them now. We ought to be, of course."

"How much sooner than they ought we to reach the peak?"

"That's pretty hard to tell. I don't know how far it is. But I should
think we ought to walk about four miles to their three. So if it's ten
miles, we ought to be about two miles and a half ahead of them when we
get there--and they ought to walk that in about half an hour--say a
little more, forty minutes."

"That would give us plenty of time to get things ready."

"I should hope so! We really haven't so very much to do when we get
there. It's quite an honor for us to be allowed to make the fire,
isn't it?"

"Yes, it is. But we won the right to do it, Bessie. You must remember
that.