Looking keenly at us to be sure that we grasped the
significance of his pantomime he remarked, "Ah want mah ol' head to stay
put."
"There ain't going to be no village till we come to trees," said Davie
Paine slowly. "If there is, we can see it anyhow, and if there isn't, this
road'll take us across the marsh. Once we're on the other side, we can
leave the road and take to the hills."
"There's an idea," Roger cried. "How about it, Bennie?"
I nodded.
Blodgett eagerly went first and the cook, apparently fearing that he was on
his way to be served as a particularly choice tidbit at somebody else's
banquet, came last. The rest of us just jostled along together. But Davie
Paine, I noticed, held his head higher than I ever had seen it before; for
Roger's appreciation of his sound common sense had pleased him beyond
measure and had done wonders to restore his self-confidence.
First there were interwoven bushes and vines beside the road, and then tall
reeds and marsh grasses; now there was sand underfoot, now mud. But it was
a better path by far than any we could have beaten out for ourselves, and
we all--except the cook--were well pleased that we had taken it.
The bushes and tall grasses, which shut us in, prevented our seeing the
ocean behind us or the hills ahead, and the miasmic mist that we had
noticed some time since billowed around our knees.
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