As usual everybody seemed ready to fall in with his suggestion but George, who had a contrary streak in his make-up, and was always ready with objections and questions and serious shakings of the head. They called him "Doubting George," but grown people would long ago have dubbed him a pessimist, because he was always seeing the gloomy side of things, and wanting to be doubly convinced.
"But it seems to me," he started to say, "that we may be jumping out of the fryingpan into the fire if we do that. How do we know the cabin lies to the right?"
"We don't," replied Elmer, without manifesting any feeling over his opinion being questioned, for he knew George of old, and in fact would have been considerably surprised if the other had not put up what Toby called a "kick."
"Would you like to direct us, George?" asked the tall scout, whose name was Arthur Stansbury, but whom his schoolmates had in a spirit of fun long ago dubbed "Lil Artha," which ridiculous nick-name clung to him like a leech to this day, although he was fully a head above any of the other fellows.
"Oh! excuse me from taking that responsibility on my shoulders," George hastened to say, looking almost alarmed; "if I did, and happened to guess wrong, I'd never hear the end of it."
"So you admit that it'd have to be a guess, do you?" pursued Lil Artha mercilessly; "well, on the part of Elmer he's tried to reason the old thing out, and both Toby'n me feel that we can't do better than try what he says. I only hope the walking's better than it's been along this frozen creek, where the ice is too slippery for us to make use of the same. Why didn't we think to fetch our skates along?"
"I did think of it," Toby told him; "but it meant more weight to our packs; and then from what Uncle Caleb's told me about the lay of the country up here, I couldn't figure out how we'd find any use for skates where there was only swamp, marsh, and mebbe a few little crooked creeks nearly always covered with a foot of snow. So I fetched these bully snow-shoes instead. Don't I hope I'll have a chance to skim over the snow on the same, if we're lucky enough to get a heavy fall while up here."
"Perhaps we may get a storm before we're ready for it," observed Elmer drily, as he shot a dubious glance up at the gray sky that had such an ominous look.
Lil Artha jumped to his feet, showing signs of some excitement.
"Hey! let's be on the hike, fellows!" he exclaimed; "if a storm dropped on top of us right now it wouldn't do a thing to us, p'raps. We haven't got only enough grub for a single day. I guess matches are about the only thing we're heavy on, because we expected to eat our meals in Uncle Caleb's cabin most of the time."