They were quite certain they had taken the right road, but it did not seem at all familiar to them. When Bob said this, George broke in with:
“When you were traveling that same road last Saturday, did you stop every now and then to look behind you?”
No, Bob couldn’t say that they did. In fact, he couldn’t see that there was any need of it, for they were going toward the village, and not toward the lake.
“That was the very reason why you ought to have taken your bearings occasionally,” said George. “Hereafter, when you are traveling through a piece of woods with which you are not acquainted, make it a point to stop every quarter of a mile or so and look back, being careful to note the shape of the trees and the lay of the land. If you will do that you will never get lost, for your eye will be sure to rest on some landmark that you will recognize when you return.”
Bob remarked that he would bear that in mind, and went on with his story.
They must have strayed away from the main thoroughfare, he said, for all of a sudden the road they were following came to an end in a brush-heap.
They tried to retrace their steps but found they couldn’t do it; and the longer they walked, the more hopelessly bewildered did they become.
Knowing that the lake lay somewhere to the north of them, they took the points of the compass from the sun, which had by this time sunk so low in the west that his beams just touched the tops of the tallest trees, and, making no further effort to find the road they had lost, they drew a bee-line through the woods, scrambling over fallen logs and forcing their way with difficulty through the dense thickets of trees and bushes that lay in their path.
For a time, they held their course with tolerable accuracy, but when the sun set and the woods became so dark that they could scarcely see each other’s faces, Dick Langdon, who was a city boy and entirely unaccustomed to severe and long-continued exertion, declared that he was completely fagged out, and that he could not possibly go any further.
“My back aches under this heavy pack, and my gun and rod seem to weigh a ton,” said he, with a despairing groan. “We can’t find George’s cabin to-night.”