After a few moments' puzzling he was quite at sea, and
could no more remember how he had been taught as to this than you can
clinch the spelling of a doubtful word after you have tried on paper a
dozen variations. But being a youth of sense he did not desert the
streamlet.
After a short half-mile of stumbling the apparent wrong direction in
the brook's bed, he came to the River. The River was also flowing the
wrong way, and uphill. Dick sat down and covered his eyes with his
hands, as I had told him to do in like instance, and so managed to
swing the country around where it belonged.
Now here was the River--and Dick resolved to desert it for no more
short cuts--but where was the canoe?
This point remained unsettled in Dick's mind, or rather it was
alternately settled in two ways. Sometimes the boy concluded we must be
still below him, so he would sit on a rock to wait. Then, after a few
moments, inactivity would bring him panic. The canoe must have passed
this point long since, and every second he wasted stupidly sitting on
that stone separated him farther from his friends and from food. Then
he would tear madly through the forest. Deuce enjoyed this game, but
Dick did not.
In time Dick found his farther progress along the banks cut off by a
hill. The hill ended abruptly at the water's edge in a sheer rock cliff
thirty feet high. This was in reality the end of the Indian trail short
cut--the point where Dick was to meet us--but he did not know it.
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