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Storm-Bound: or, A Vacation Among the Snow Drifts
Storm-Bound; or, A Vacation Among the Snow Drifts
CHAPTER I
ON THE WRONG TRACK
"Elmer, do you believe we're really on the right track, or have we lost our bearings in this everlasting snow forest?"
"Ask me something easy, please, Lil Artha!"
"Well, I didn't like the looks of that sassy kid who was so eager to have you make a map from what he told us."
"Struck me he grinned too much, boys, as sure as my name's George Robbins. I'm beginning to smell a rat, and think he played a low-down trick on us."
"That is, George, you mean he purposely gave us the wrong directions, and that instead of heading straight for the winter cabin of Toby's jolly Uncle Caleb we're away off our base?"
"Looks like it to me, that's all I've got to say," muttered the boy who had called himself George, at the same time glancing apprehensively at the snow-clad woods surrounding them on all sides.
"Me too!" added the fourth member of the little heavily-laden party, and whose good-natured face usually screwed itself up in an odd series of wrinkles whenever he spoke with such an effort.
"Well," remarked the boy called Elmer, whose last name was Chenowith, and upon whose decisions the others seemed to depend considerably, as though he might be a leader among them; "let's rest up a bit here, and look the matter squarely in the face. Perhaps we can figure out where we've gone wrong, and start on a new course."
These four well-grown lads were all dressed in the well-known khaki suits that designate Boy Scouts the wide world over. Of course they wore heavy woolen sweaters in addition, for the time was just after Christmas, and Old Winter had taken a notion to set in unusually early that year.
They belonged to the Hickory Ridge Troop of Boy Scouts, which lively town was situated many miles to the south of the place where we discover the quartette up against a puzzling question.