Chapter Forty Five.
Trying an Impossibility.
We two set out to perform an impossibility: for though, starting together on a long journey, a good steady walker might tire out a horse carrying a man, and in a fortnight’s work, before we had got half-way to Barnstaple, I knew that my father would have arranged to catch the coach, and I remembered that the coach would change horses every ten or twelve miles; and as all this forced itself into my mind, I sat down on a stone by the road-side.
“Tired?” said Bigley, wiping the perspiration from his face.
“No, not yet; but I’ve been thinking, and my thoughts get heavier every moment,” I replied.
“What do you mean?” cried Bigley.
“That we cannot do this,” I said; “and we should be doing something far more sensible if we go back home, and write a letter to my father. Why, it would get to him days before we could.”
Bigley took off his cap and rubbed his ear.
“I’m afraid you are right,” he said; “but I don’t like to go back.”