“Help, if it is to come, must come from the outside,” he said.
His words rang hollowly in the musty, subterranean passage.
CHAPTER XXIV.
TWO COLUMNS OF SMOKE.
Through the deep woods a boyish figure was creeping. It was Hiram, footsore, sick and despondent. It was the second day since he had left the scene of the Boy Scouts’ misfortune. Behind him lay the lake. And that was about all he knew definitely of his situation.
For the last hour of his slow progress over the cruelly rough ground, the lad’s heart had almost failed him. But he had kept pluckily on. At last, though, he was compelled, from sheer exhaustion, to sink down under a big hickory tree. He was lost, hopelessly lost in the midst of the Adirondack wilds.
Few men or boys who have ever been in a similar fix will not realize the extreme danger of Hiram’s position. There are still vast tracks in these mountains untrodden, except, perchance, at long intervals, by the foot of man. The predicament of one who misses his way in their lonely stretches is serious indeed. Hiram was a nervous, sensitive boy, moreover, and, as the dark shadows of late afternoon began to steal through the woods, he felt a sense of keen fear, and alarm. He even thought he could make out the forms of savage beasts prowling about him.
At last the boy determined, by a brave effort, to make the best of it. He ate a meal of bread and salt meat from his haversack and washed it down with water from his canteen. Then he set himself to thinking about a way out of his position.
But as is often the case with those hopelessly lost in the wilderness, his brain refused to work coherently. A sort of panic had clutched him. To his excited, overwrought imagination it appeared that it was his fate, his destiny to die alone in these great, silent woods, stretching, for all he knew, to infinity on every side of him.
“I must brace up and do something,” thought Hiram desperately; “maybe I haven’t wandered as far as I think. Perhaps a signal fire might be seen by somebody. I’ll try it, anyhow.”
The thought of doing something cheered him mightily. The task of gathering wood and bark to make his fire also helped to keep his mind off his predicament.