“I guess you don’t believe he come by ’em in a legitimate way,” laughed Mr. Swan. “Well, mebbe he didn’t; I don’t know. He said he found ’em while he and his cousins were roaming about in the woods, hunting squirrels. The place to hunt for them is around cornfields, and not in thick woods.”
Having at last found their letters, Joe and his chums slung their camp-baskets over their shoulders, and started for the hotel, talking with the guide as they went, and listening attentively to his instructions regarding the route they would have to follow in order to reach the spring-hole. They engaged him to look out for their skiff while they were gone, after which they hunted up the storekeeper, from whom they purchased supplies enough to last them a week.
“Going up to No-Man’s Pond, be you?” said Morris, the guide who had patched up the hole that Matt Coyle’s scow knocked in the skiff on the night the “battle in the dark” took place. “Well, you’ll catch plenty of fish, but you will have a hard time getting there. You see, some lazy lout of a guide went to work and filled the carry full of trees and bushes, for fear that he might be called upon to show a guest over there. You will have to pick your way through the thickest woods you ever saw; so you want to go as light as possible.”
“We shall take nothing but my canvas canoe, these three camp-baskets, and our rods and guns,” replied Joe. “We have a good compass—”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t quarrel with it,” said Morris. “If you get turned around and see the sun go down in the north, when he ought to set in the west, don’t get frightened and run yourself to death, the way Billy Sawyer done two years ago. Billy had been guide for this country, man and boy, for more than twenty years. The last time I saw him, he was just starting out for the swamp about three miles the other side of No-Man’s Pond, intending to spend a month or so in trapping; but we don’t think he ever saw the swamp or the pond, either. First he lost his bearings, then he lost his head, then he went tearing through the woods, till he dropped and died of exhaustion within half a mile of the hotel.”
“And he was an old guide, you say?” exclaimed Roy.
“Sartin. Guides ain’t no more infallible than other folks. I have been lost myself; but my employer didn’t know it, I bet you. I kept my head about me, and worked my way out all right. Well, good-by. You can eat supper on the shore of that pond if you hold the direct course; but if you lose it don’t grumble at the compass.”