“Fancy that,” I said to him. “If you don’t like going around with us, you can go my way and I’ll go yours.”
“You start out in the morning,” he shouted, “without any lunch and look where we are now, with no village anywhere around and nothing to eat.”
“Do you expect me to get a village and bring it here?” I asked him. “Is it my fault there isn’t any village here? Did I make the map of the Catskill Mountains? I’ll leave it to Dub. We’re having a fine hike with detours. What are you kicking about?”
“I can’t eat detours!” the kid shouted.
“Well you couldn’t eat a village either,” I said; “so what are you talking about?”
“Will you fellows listen?” Dub said. “For just two seconds will you listen? We’ve got a big chance, haven’t we? We’ve got a chance to do something that will knock Temple Camp off its feet. Suppose we can find that will! First will somebody please tell me what one of those dispatch containers is like. I’d like to know whether one would last all this while—whether it would be preserved.”
“If you’re talking about preserves,” I said, “you’d better ask Pee-wee. He knows all about preserves.”
“Are you going to be serious when there’s a real mystery or not?” the kid yelled. “Now we’ve got a chance to do something, are you going to have some sense or not? Are we going to get something to eat I don’t know how, and are we going to try to find that oilskin cover or whatever you call it, or are we just going to stay here talking crazy and acting like fools—which?”
“We are going to plan our campaign at once, ain’t it,” I told him. “The answer is no we do, by an unanimous minority.”
“Listen,” said Sandy, kind of sober like. “It’s noon-time and we thought that by this time we’d be at a village or some place or other. We’ve got a chance to do something big. Are we just going to fool around or what? I’d like to hunt for that thing, only we’ve got to have something to eat, that’s sure.”