“Well,” Larry offered; “it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other; sixty-odd miles over and among these little mountains—with no trail to follow, or half that distance over one big mountain—also with no trail that we know anything about.”
“I’m as green as grass, now that you’ve got me away from the streets and sidewalks,” Purdick put in, “but I should say it’s a question of the time either hike will take. How about that? We’ve grub enough, such as it is, for a couple of days, or maybe three, if we go on short commons.”
“It’s a guess, either way,” Larry admitted. “We’ve been dawdling along so that we don’t really know what we could make on a sure-enough forced march.”
“What is the best day’s distance we have covered, this far?” It was Purdick who wanted to know, and Dick answered him.
“Not over seventeen or eighteen miles, at the most, I should say.”
Purdick nodded. “Say we can make twenty, by pushing the jacks a bit, and keep it up for three days. That would take us to this Shotgun place, or within a few hours’ march of it. Let me look over these canned remnants again,” and he suited the action to the word.
“Well?” queried Larry, when Purdick had made his estimate.
“Bad medicine,” was the verdict. “There’s enough of the stuff to go round if we spread it thin, but we can’t march very hard on tomatoes and peaches and dried potato chips. There’s one little can of corned beef, but that will give us only a taste apiece for one meal. And as to the flour and corn-meal, you can see where we stand when I tell you that I used half of what I could scrape up for our suppers to-night.”
Larry was shaking his head again. “I’m afraid it’s the short cut over the mountain for ours. It’s just as you say, Purdy; we can’t march very far on half-rations. Let’s see what we can get out of this Survey map for information about routes and altitudes.”
For some little time they pored studiously over the excellent map. There were no trails marked in the direction in which they would be forced to go to reach Natrolia, and no passes in the range named as such. All they could do was to go by the altitude contour lines, and the lowest marking they could find that was anywhere near in the direct line was something over 9,000 feet. Since the altitude of their camp was about 6,000 feet, that meant a climb of more than 3,000 feet straight up through a trackless wilderness, and a descent of the same or a greater distance on the other side of the range.