But Dick has a beloved uncle. In moments of
expansion to this relative after his return he held forth as to the
happenings of that morning.
Dick and the setter managed the Indian trail for about twenty rods.
They thought they managed it for perhaps twice that distance. Then it
became borne in on them that the bushes went back, the faint
knife-clippings, and the half weather-browned brush-cuttings that alone
constitute an Indian trail had taken another direction, and that they
had now their own way to make through the forest. Dick knew the
direction well enough, so he broke ahead confidently. After a
half-hour's walk he crossed a tiny streamlet. After another half-hour's
walk he came to another. It was flowing the wrong way.
Dick did not understand this. He had never known of little streams
flowing away from rivers and towards eight-hundred-foot hills. This
might be a loop, of course. He resolved to follow it up-stream far
enough to settle the point. The following brought him in time to a
soggy little thicket with three areas of moss-covered mud and two
round, pellucid pools of water about a foot in diameter. As the little
stream had wound and twisted, Dick had by now lost entirely his sense
of direction. He fished out his compass and set it on a rock. The River
flows nearly north-east to the Big Falls, and Dick knew himself to be
somewhere east of the River. The compass appeared to be wrong. Dick was
a youth of sense, so he did not quarrel with the compass; he merely
became doubtful as to which was the north end of the needle--the white
or the black.
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