“Guess it’s all right,” Murphy remarked, walking out into the open. He made his way straight for the old camp fire and began hunting around it as though he had lost something the night before.
“What did you lose?” Scott asked.
“Nothing, I was only hoping that they had lost something to eat here. If I had that deer we saw last night I could chew a leg off her. When did we have anything to eat last, anyway?”
It was a long time since they had had any food and the sight of the empty tin cans around the fire made it seem even longer. They could not find so much as a scrap of bread.
“Cheer up, Murphy,” Scott exclaimed, “we are going into a new country now and we may find a house in the first fifty miles or so. Who knows?”
CHAPTER XVIII
They were, indeed, going into a new country, that is, a new and strange country to them, but really a very cold country if they were to believe the signs about them. They were scarcely out of sight of the camp-fire site when they stumbled on to the ruins of the old town of St. Joseph. It had evidently been a gay and prosperous place at one time. The outlines of the foundations of huge cotton warehouses were distinctly traceable and the ground was littered with pieces of broken bricks. A little farther on they found a foundation almost half full of broken champagne bottles, and beyond that the oval of a racetrack almost uncanny in its appearance of recent use. There were certain things about it which made it seem as though the place had been suddenly destroyed by an earthquake or other catastrophe only a short time before. It was very hard to realize that there had been no one living there for eighty years.
It was a question with the boys whether they would push on west along the beach in the hope of striking a town in that direction or whether they would turn north to the main-line railroad. Their experience with the blind pocket which they had gotten into the night before made them a little afraid of the beach, and they had no idea how far it might be in that direction before they would come to a town. They knew that the railroad could not be over forty miles north and thought it would be reasonable to expect to find some settlement in that direction. Food was beginning to be a serious consideration.
They stood on the edge of the old town and looked about them. Each knew what was in the other’s mind.
“Let’s try it to the north,” Murphy suggested. “There ought to be some grub somewhere up in that direction.”