“Here,” David gave him one of the paddles, “take this. Hang the bucket over your shoulder and you won’t notice it.”
“Castle Garden,” said Bascomb, as he settled the bucket on his back. “Lead on, Macduff!”
There was no visible footpath, simply the trees which David had “spotted” at intervals on the route, to guide them. A few rods from the Lost Farm trail the ground rose gradually, becoming rocky and uneven as they went on, clambering over logs and toiling up gullies, whose rugged, boulder-strewn banks, thickly timbered with spruce and hemlock, were replicas in miniature of the wooded hills and rocky valleys they had left behind, for as they entered deeper and deeper into the mysterious gloom of half-light that swam listlessly through the fans of spreading cedars, and flickered through the webs of shadowy firs, their surroundings grew more and more eerie, till the living sunlight of the outer world seemed a memory.
Suddenly Bascomb, consistently acting his part as the commissariat, in that he kept well to the rear, stepped on the moss-covered slant of a boulder. The soggy moss gave way and he shot down the hillside, the lunch-bucket catapulting in wide gyrations ahead of him. It brought up against a tree with a splintering crash.
“Hey, Walt! What are you doing?” shouted David, peering over the edge of the gully.
“Just went back for the lunch,” called Bascomb, as he got up and gathered the widely dispersed fragments of the “commissary” together.
“I’ve busted my bifocals,” he said, as he scrambled up the slope; “so if there is any grub missing, you’ll know why.”
“That’s too bad,” said Swickey, trying not to laugh. “Where’s the bucket?”
“Here!” said Bascomb, displaying the handle and two staves; “that is, it’s the only part of it that was big enough to recover.”
He laid the remnants of the lunch on a rock, and gazed about him with the peculiar expression of one suddenly deprived of glasses.