"Good!" cried all the boys in chorus, and so the motion was carried.
"If worse comes to worst," said Tom, "I'll take my gun, break my way out of here, and kill something fit to eat, at whatever risk. The game of every sort is starving now as well as we are. The turkeys, deer, rabbits and all the rest of them will be out on the mountains hunting for something to eat on those spots that the wind has blown clear of snow. It will be curious if I don't get some of them."
"We'll permit nothing of the kind," said Jack, "till the snow stops and freezing weather makes a crust upon it. To go out now would simply mean suicide. You wouldn't live to get out of this snowdrift, and if you did, you'd perish in the next one, Tom."
"Probably," answered Tom, in a meditative voice. "But I'd rather die that way, in an effort to save the whole company than stay here and starve like a rat in a hole."
"But," broke in the Doctor, "we are not yet starving. We are hungry, of course, having had an insufficient supply of food to-day. And we'll be hungrier to-morrow, and still hungrier next day. But as I reckon it we have food enough, at least to keep life in our bodies for three or four days to come if we hoard it carefully and eat only so much as is necessary to sustain life. By that time the weather will have changed in some way, and we shall have found some means of supplying ourselves."
So it was decided that Tom should not court death by attempting to go out upon the mountain under existing conditions.
"By the way, Doctor," asked Ed, "what are your weather predictions?"
"I can't make any," answered the Doctor. "It is still snowing hard; the barometer is low; the wind, which amounts to nothing, has shifted to the south-west—a bad quarter, suggesting more snow—and so far as I can see there is no promise of severe cold weather, which is what we most want now."
In this melancholy plight the boys went to bed, and, thanks to their high health and extreme weariness, they slept soundly.