“So do I. Col will have a peck of swamp mud to carry round with him. His clothes are heavy and damp. If I only had my compass we could steer a fairly straight course, for these woods lie to the southeast of the town; don’t they? Anybody got a watch on? I left mine at home.” Nixon looked eagerly at his companions.
“Our boy-scout handbook tells us how to use the watch as a compass by pointing the hour-hand to the sun and reckoning back halfway to noon, at which point the south would be.”
“My ‘timer’ is out of commission,” regretted Marcoo.
Neither of the other two boys possessed a watch.
“In that case we might trust to the dog to lead us out of the woods. We’d better just tell Blink to go home, and follow him; he’ll find his way out some time; won’t you, pup?” Nix stooped to fondle the tan ears of the terrier which had taken to him from the first, having never harbored the ghost of a suspicion of his being a “flowerpot fellow.”
The little dog stretched his jaws in a tired yawn. The pink pads of his paws were sore from much running, following up rabbit trails, and the rest. But the purple lights in his faithful brown eyes said plainly: “Leave it to me, fellows! Instinct can put it all over reason, just now!”
But Blink’s master started an opposition movement. He had been invited to guide the expedition; he was averse to resigning such leadership to his terrier; in that case his supposed knowledge of the woods, of which he had boasted aforetime to the Exmouth boys, would henceforth be regarded as a “windy joke.”
“Follow Blink!” Thus he flouted the idea. “If we do, we won’t get out of these woods before midnight! He’ll dodge round after every live thing he sees, from a weasel to a grasshopper—like a regular will-o’-the-wisp. The sensible thing to do is to search for a logging-road—we’re sure to come to one in time—and follow that on. Or a stream—a stream would lead out on to the salt-marshes, to join the river.”
“There don’t appear to be any streams in these woods; they seem as dry as an attic!” Nixon, the scout, knew that the proposal now adopted by the majority was all wrong, contrary to the advice derived through his book from the great Chief Scout, Grand Master of Woodlore, but he hated to raise another fuss or make a split in the camp.
So the quartette of boys filed slowly up the slope and back into the woods, Coombsie carrying the almost empty basket, containing sparse remnants of the feast: “We may be hungry before we arrive home!” he remarked, with involuntary foreboding in his tone.