They looked about them. They were on a hillside in a little clearing in a high, narrow valley. On every side were woods, dark and impenetrable. Just below they could hear the purl of a brook, and the trees about them were bare with the dark bareness of spring, a few fugitive buds being the only announcement that the season of growing was at hand. No landmarks, no roads were visible, and the sky was darkening fast.
"The question," said Gloria, "is not where do we go, but where are we going from."
"It might be most anywhere," remarked Murray. "Adirondacks, Catskills, or even Laurentians. I don't think we got far enough west for it to be the Blue Ridge or the Appalachians, but there's no way of telling."
"Well," Gloria offered, "I've been in a lot of mountains in my day, but I never saw any where following a stream didn't take you somewhere sooner or later. I vote we trail along with that brook there and see what happens."
"Bright thought," commented Ben. "Let's see what we can dig out of the wreck by way of weapons."
"What for? There aren't any animals, and they couldn't hurt you if there were. If we meet any of the Lassans any weapon you got out of that mess wouldn't be much use. Wish we had a flashlight though."
Treading carefully, but with a good deal of noise and confusion, they began to crash their way through the underbrush along the bank of the stream. At the foot of the valley it dived over a diminutive waterfall and then tumbled into another similar brook. Along the combined streams ran a road—a dirt road originally, now long untraveled, muddy and bad, but still a road.
An hour's walking brought them around the foot of another mountain and into a valley where the road divided before a projecting buttress of rock. A teetering sign-post stood at the fork. With some trouble, and after getting himself immersed to the knees in the ditch, Murray managed to reach it and straining his eyes in the starlight, made out what it said. "THIS WAY TO HAMILTON'S CHICKEN DINNERS. 1 MILE" it read. With a snort of disgust he hurled the deceitful guidepost into the ditch and joined the others.
"Toss a coin," someone suggested. No coins. A knife was flipped up instead. It fell heads and in accordance with its decision they took the road to the right. It led them along beside the stream for a while, then parted company with it and began to climb, and they soon found themselves at the crest of the hill. The night had become darker and darker, clouding over. But for the road they would have been completely lost. Finally, after skirting the hillcrest for a distance, the road dipped abruptly, and as it did so, they passed out of the forest into a region cleared but not cultivated, with numerous close-cut stumps coming right to the roadside.
"But for the fact that it's a long ways away," remarked Sherman, "I would say that this was the district around the Lassan headquarters."