Page:Lost with Lieutenant Pike (1919).djvu/202

 Full of aches and pains (and that was all!) they had passed a bad night, so that this morning they really had been glad to stagger up and out again, into the bleak whity-gray, even though they might be starting upon only another long day of fruitless tramping.

Baroney groaned.

"Ma foi! My legs move, my head thinks, but there is nothing between. I have no stomach."

"We'll find meat to-day. Not only for ourselves but for the boys in camp, remember," encouraged the doctor. "They're likely depending on us, for we've heard no gunshots. We must separate and hunt widely."

They had trudged forth, before sun-up. They had crossed the first wooded ridge, to the next little valley.

"Stub, you follow up, along the high ground on this side," the doctor ordered. "Baroney will take the middle. I'll take the farther side. Move slowly and all together, and we'll surely start something. Head off anything that comes your way, Stub, and drive it down to us. Don't waste the load in your pistol."

"Yes, I will drive," answered Stub, patiently.

He waited, shivering, until Baroney had halted in the bottom, and the doctor had toiled clear across