“Charmed.”
“We have passed the houses without seeing them in the storm, and are now on the side of the mountain opposite from where we started.”
“So that you conclude—?”
“We are lost.”
This was, of course, mere guesswork; but we had no compass, and might be travelling in the wrong direction, after all. A moment’s reflection, however, reassured me. “Is that your opinion, too, George?” I asked.
George had taken off his boot, and was chafing his swollen ankle. He looked up.
“My opinion is that I don’t know anything about it; but as you got us into this scrape, you had better get us out of it, and be spry about it too, for the deuce take me if I can go much farther.”
“Why,” croaked the colonel, “I recollect hearing of a traveller who, like us, actually walked by the Summit House without seeing it, when he was hailed by a man who, by mere accident, chanced to be outside, and who imagined he saw something moving in the fog. In five minutes the stranger would inevitably have walked over a precipice with his eyes open.”
“And I remember seeing on the wall of the tavern where we stopped, at Bartlett, a placard offering a reward for a man who, like us, set out from Crawford’s, and was never heard of,” George put in.[10]
“And I read of one who, like us, almost reached the summit, but mistaking a lower peak for the pinnacle, losing his head, crawled, exhausted, under a rock to die there,” I finished, firing the last shot.