“Might have known that if we’d stopped to think about it,” Merton growled, as they immediately retraced their steps. “This fellow makes all the travel there is on that road, going to the store.”
They soon reached the main road again—if such it could be called. Scott blazed a tree with his tomahawk and wrote the directions on it. “Might as well save them the trouble,” he explained, “even if it does help them to catch up with us.”
For nine miles more they jogged on steadily and were beginning to think that things were not as bad as they had been painted when they came to another fork where the road split up into two indistinct tracts, neither one of them sufficiently plain to justify anyone in following it with the hope of ever reaching a town however remote. They had not seen a soul since they left camp and there certainly seemed very little chance of their meeting anyone on either of those roads.
“Neither one of them looks good to me,” Merton grunted. “Let’s eat some lunch and then toss up for it.”
It seemed the only thing to do, and in a few minutes they were eating hungrily. They had brought a canteen with them, and it was well that they had—for they had not passed anything, even at the tumbledown cabin which looked like good drinking water.
“There is one thing sure,” Scott said; “we have been traveling pretty steadily westward and must be north of where we want to go. Then we want to take the south road.”
“Yes,” Merton assented, “and if we get out there five miles or so before we find that we are wrong we’ll beat it across country to the northwest till we strike the right road instead of coming back here. We can’t lose much that way.”
“No,” Scott agreed, “nothing but ourselves.”
“Well,” Merton said, looking apprehensively down the road, “let’s be going. We don’t want those other fellows to catch up with us here and think we’re stumped on this fork in the road.”
They scrambled to their feet and set out briskly, for, as Scott explained, if it was the wrong road they wanted to find it out before dark, as it would not be very easy to travel across country through the woods in the night. The road did not get any better or any worse, nor give any other signs of its ultimate destination. They had been traveling in this way for two hours when they heard a dog barking ahead of them, and soon they spied a small shack.