Now, it was for the most part caked and dried up, its coloring power weakened; yet there were still moist and vivid spots such as that in which Blink, with the dog’s unerring instinct for scenting out the unusual, had smeared himself.
And those spots the boys promptly turned into a rouge-pot. They painted their own faces and each other’s, until more savage-looking red men these woods had never seen.
They forbore from delaying to smear their bodies, as Nixon had suggested, for one word was now booming in each tired brain like a foghorn through a mist: “Lost! Lost! Lost!” And they could not quite escape from it in this new diversion.
Still they tried to dye hope a fresh rose-color at this forest paintpot too: to silence with whooping yells and fantastic capers, and in flitting war-dances in and out among the trees, the grim raving of that word in their ears.
They painted Blink likewise in zebra-like stripes across his back, whereupon he promptly rolled on the ground, blurring his markings, until he was a mottled and grotesque red-and-white object.
“He looks like a clown’s dog,” said Coombsie. “If any one should meet us in the woods, they’d think we were a troop of painted guys escaped from a circus! We’ll create a sensation in the town when we get home—if we ever do?” sotto voce. “Hadn’t we better stop ‘training on’ now, and try to get somewhere?”
So, controlling the training-on, capering savage now rampant in each one corresponding to his painted face, they toiled on again, while the afternoon shadows lengthened in the woods—until they stood transfixed, their war-whoops silenced, before another surprise of the woods on which they had tumbled, unprepared.
It was a lengthy gray cairn of stones with a rude wooden marker at the top bearing the date 1790, and at the foot a modern granite slab inscribed with the words: “Bishop’s Grave,” and the date of the stone’s erection.
“Bishop’s Grave!” Coombsie ejaculated, while the empty basket drooped heavily from his hand as if “the grasshopper had suddenly become a burden.” “I’ve heard of the grave, but I’ve never seen it before. Bishop was lost in these woods about a hundred and twenty-one years ago; he couldn’t find his way out and wandered round till he died. His body was discovered months afterwards and they buried it here.”
Awe fell upon the four boys. Their faces were drawn under the smearing of paint. Their eyes gleamed strangely, like sunken islands, from out their ruddy setting. The mottled terrier, with that sympathetic perception which dogs have of their masters’ moods, pointed one ear sharply and drooped the other, like a flag at half-mast, while he stared at the rude cairn.