"You remember that mountain up in the Catskills?" Tom said. "The first time I ever went to the top of that mountain was in the middle of the night. I never make that kind of mistakes. I know because I just know."
Roscoe laughed again and looked rather dubiously at the light in the distance. Then he shook his head, unconvinced.
"We've been winding in and out along the edge of this woods," said Tom, "so that you're kind of mixed up, that's all. It's always those little turns that throw people out, just like it's a choppy sea that upsets a boat; it ain't the big waves. I used to get rattled like that myself, but I don't any more."
Roscoe drew his lips tight and shook his head skeptically. "I can't understand about that light," he said.
"I always told you you made a mistake not to be a scout when you were younger," said Tom in that impassive tone which seemed utterly free of the spirit of criticism and which always amused Roscoe, "'cause then you wouldn't bother about the light but you'd look at the stars. Those are sure."
Roscoe looked up at the sky and back at Tom, and perhaps he found a kind of reassurance in that stolid face. "All right, Tommy," said he, "what you say, goes. Come ahead."
"That light is probably on the road the Germans retreated across," said Tom, as they picked their way along. His unerring instinct left him entirely free from the doubts which Roscoe could not altogether dismiss. "I don't say there ain't a light on the path you're talking about, but if we followed this one we'd probably get captured. I was seven months in a German prison. I don't know how you'd like it, but I didn't."
Roscoe laughed silently at Tom's dry way of putting it. "All right, Tommy, boy," he said. "Have it your own way."
"You ought to be satisfied the way you can shoot," said Tom, by way of reconciling Roscoe to his leadership.
"All right, Tommy. Maybe you've got the bump of locality. When we get past that little arm of the woods just ahead we ought to see the right light then, huh?"