“I move we start on,” put in Billie, briskly. “We’re obliged to get somewhere some time.”
“I’ll put it to the vote, then,” announced Ben. “Shall we go toward Indian Head or Sunrise? We are nearer to Indian Head, and we may strike a farm and hire a horse and wagon to take us home.”
This seemed a good suggestion, and they accordingly turned their faces toward the mountain, the rugged outline of which resembled the profile of an Indian.
Anything to get on solid dry land again was the unspoken thought of the six friends. Once on dry surfaces and out of the level treacherous monotony of the bog, they felt they might be equal to anything. For nearly two hours they worked their way through the morass without making any apparent progress toward the mountain. And now the sun was sinking behind the Western range. Ben watched the lessening rays with feelings very much like despair.
“If I had been alone or with some of the fellows it wouldn’t have mattered,” he thought, “but with the girls——”
In a little while Table Top took on the appearance of a vast plain shut in by high walls. It was a weird, lonely place.
“It reminds me of the Valley of the Shadow of Death in ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’,” Mary whispered to Ben, who was helping her over the rough, uneven ground. “Don’t you remember the Wilderness that Christian had to pass through before he reached the Celestial City?”
“I’m afraid I never read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’,” Ben confessed in grief-stricken tones, “but I can see what you mean, and the white mist that’s rolling in looks like a troop of spirits.”
“Would any person or persons care to hear me sing some cheerful ditty?” asked Percy, and he forthwith began to sing in a rollicking tenor voice:
“‘It was a robber’s daughter and her name was Alice Brown;
Her father was the terror of a small Italian town,
Her mother was a foolish, weak, but amiable old thing,
But it isn’t of her parents that I’m going for to sing.