My friends were always willing to follow my suggestion, and we tried it.
The road curved west, then west-by-south.
“Stop a moment! We had better go back to the old route. I don’t like this very much now.”
Again Tynsdale and Kent followed obediently.
This was the first instance of many in which I did not allow myself to be guided by my instinct, as I should have done if I had been alone. I felt so strongly my responsibility toward my friends that I disliked taking any move I could not fully explain by cold reasoning. Instinct is generally unreasonable. Besides, it does sometimes lead one astray. In our case it might compel us to walk across-country, and the cross-country stretches in this part of Germany looked forbidding on the map, being mostly marked as heather, moors, and swamps.
Having regained the former road, I discovered after a while that it was turning too much to the south. I was still musing about this when we entered a smooth, broad, first-class highway.
“Let’s rest for a spell,” I suggested.
We sat down, with our feet in the ditch, close to the trunk of one of the enormous trees lining the roadside.
“Do you know where we are?” asked Kent, after I had consulted the map and sat blinking again to accustom my eyes to the night.
“Of course I do,” I snorted irritably. “We’re on that beastly southern highway I wanted to avoid. I wish I hadn’t been such a fool as to abandon the other road. I don’t know how we got here. The map shows no connecting road down to here at all. The only damage done, as far as I can see, is that we have increased our distance from water. We can hit the by-road leading north, if we follow the chaussée. Oh, I’m thirsty! I’ll try a cigarette.” We all lit up.