As we approached the pond, three other personages came into sight. These were Rob Currier, Jimmy Toppan, and Joe Carter. Charley Carter had been one of the organizers of the expedition, but a too intimate association with Mr. Hawkins's Bartlett pear tree and the fruit thereof, late on the previous afternoon, had rendered his absence unavoidable.
From his elder brother we gathered that Charles had passed the darkling hours in a manner not altogether agreeable, and that his parents, and even Dr. Macey, had been in consultation over the matter. Indeed, it was a narrow escape for Joe that he was not made to suffer vicarious punishment, and be kept at home on this day of days, but luckily he had been able to prove an alibi.
This was not on account of illness, but, as we had all been made aware, because he disapproved of our methods. It was absurd, he had pointed out, to go on such an excursion without a compass. The military instinct which already made Peter regard himself as a future ornament to the United States Army, and which is doubtless of supreme value to him to-day in a stock-broker's office,--this instinct demanded a compass in order to find our path through the wilds.
None of us had a compass, and Peter's was broken, and could not be replaced until his birthday,--six months hence. We must either postpone our trip for six months or go without Peter. He would not trust himself so far from civilization unless at any moment he might satisfy his passion for knowing where lay the north.
Some little delicacy made us refrain from suggesting that at the farthest point which we should probably reach, the spires of most of the churches in town would undoubtedly be visible, and that we might take our bearings from these.
Jimmy Toppan, then, as now, a navigator of deep seas, was one on whom the compass argument had made a profound impression. He described an ingenious but complicated recipe (which had once proved the salvation of certain mariners) whereby the hands of a watch,--if directed toward the sun, or away from the sun, I forget which, at noon, might serve in place of the magnetic needle.
But, as Rob Currier observed, we might be hopelessly lost long before noon, and Ed Mason supplemented this gloomy prophecy by recalling the fact that Peter Bailey's Waterbury watch (the only time-piece amongst us) was never going, through Peter's constant neglect to spend the fifteen minutes necessary to wind it up.