“It’s quite a long time since I had a meal of that kind,” he said. “After all, there is a certain satisfaction in the feeling that you couldn’t eat very much more even if you had it, though that’s an opportunity to which I’ve not been accustomed lately. I’ve made my supper rather frequently on half of a stale flapjack, and had the other half for breakfast the next day. Having admitted that, suppose we turn our attention to the proposition in front of us. You were heading south when you separated from Verneille, Grenfell?”
“About south. I can’t be sure.”
“That,” observed the surveyor, “may mean anything between southeast and southwest; and if we take the spot where you found your partner afterward, and make a sweep with a forty-mile radius, which is what we’ve concluded was the distance he probably covered, it gives us quite a big tract of country to search. Still, we ought to find a lake that’s a mile or two across.”
Weston laughed softly.
“It’s my third attempt, and I don’t know how often Grenfell has tried. One could almost fancy that the lake has vanished. That sounds a little absurd, doesn’t it?”
“Well,” said Devine, with an air of reflection, “we won’t admit that it’s an impossibility. If you can take that for granted, it simplifies the thing.”
Grenfell, who lay with his back against a fir trunk, roused himself suddenly.
“I never thought of it in that way,” he said. “Still, lakes as big as that one don’t vanish.”
“Anyway, mines seem to do so. The woods are full of them, if all one hears is true.”
“It isn’t,” said Weston dryly, “though I’ve no doubt there are a few lost mines. Are you sure you haven’t done a crazy thing in joining us in the hunt for this one? Of course, I’ve tried to put that aspect of the matter squarely before you already.”