"Well, I know what I'll do!" Leon tore off his jacket. "I'll tie the sleeves of my coat round the trunk of the tree; that will prevent his coming down, so I've heard my father say. Bother! they won't meet. I'll have to use your coat too, Nix!"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the scout's Norfolk jacket, thrown down beside the basket at the foot of the tree, and was knotting it to his own, when there was a wild shriek from Colin:--

"Look! Look! He's jumped over into the other tree. Oh! he's come down; he's on the ground now--there beyond the ash tree--rolling over like a ball! Oh, he's going--going like a slate sliding downhill!"

While Leon had been so cleverly knotting the coats round the tree-trunk, and his terrier barking up it, the young c.o.o.n had outwitted them and dropped like an acrobat to the ground, having gained the odds of a dozen yards in his race for safety.

Off went the terrier after him, now! Off went the four boys, hot on the trail too, madly rushing down the hill clear to the edge of the alder-swamp toward which it sloped--yes! and into its quagmire borders too, while the crows, raving like a foghorn, supplied music for the chase.

But the speed of the limping wild animal enabled it, having gained its short legs--despite the injury of the stone--to reach the shelter of a quivering clump of alders where Blink worried in and out in vain, nose to the ground--sniffing and baffled.

"Oh, we've lost sight of him now! He's given us the slip," cried Colin, recklessly dashing for the alders.

Suddenly the air cracked with his cry that raved with terror like the crows: "Help! _Help!_ I'm into it now--into it plunk--into Big Swamp!

I'm sinking--s-sinking above my waist! Help! Help!"

CHAPTER IV

VARNEY'S PAINTPOT

"I'm 'plunk' into it! I'm sinking in the swamp mud! I can't--can't get out! Oh--h-help--help!"

Colin's wild cries as he found himself sinking in the oozing, olive-green mud of the vast alder-swamp, struck his comrades with a momentary blind horror.

The half-immersed boy was indeed "plunk" into it; he was submerged to his waist and slowly sinking inch by inch farther, now fairly gibbering in his frantic terror of being swallowed bodily by one of the many sucking throats of Big Swamp.

He writhed and struggled madly, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the rank gra.s.s whose slimy roots came away in his hand--at the bushes--even at the brilliant poison sumac, already ruddy as a swamp lamp--with the clutch of a drowning man; Leon's remembered words stinging his ears like noisome insects: "There are _live_ spots in that swamp where one might go out of sight--_quick_!"

The hideous slimy life of the spongy bog, half water, half mud!

Leon's sharp-featured face at that moment seemed to be carved out of pale wood as his snapping eyes took in the swamp, with its groves of whispering alders, its margin of scattered birch-trees and swamp cedars, the lamplike sumac burning maliciously--the sinking boyish figure amid the moist green dreariness!

Now, Starrie Chase was by Nature's gift more quick-witted than his companions, even than the trained boy scout.

"If we try to wade in toward him, we'll sink ourselves!" he cried. "I'll try to haul him out with that birch-tree."

A leaping, plunging run, sinking to his ankles, and with the long bound of a gray squirrel he alighted upon the supple trunk of a tall white-birch sapling that grew within the borders of the swamp!

No squirrel ever climbed more rapidly than did he to its middle branches.

And the yellow flame in his eyes, now, was not a spark from persecution's fire.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HELP! _HELP!_"]

"Hold on, Col! Keep up! The tree'll pull you out. I'll bend it down to you. When it comes within reach of your arms catch hold of the trunk!

Hang on for your life! I'll shin down, and 'twill hoist you up--you're lighter than I am!"

He was bending the tall, supple trunk, with its leafy crown, down--down--as he spoke. It creaked beneath his fifteen-year-old weight.

The strained roots groaned in the swampy soil.

"Gee! if the roots should give way _I'll_ land in the soup too," was his piercing thought; and a shudder ran down his spine as he saw the pools of olive-green bog-soup beneath him--bottomless pools--in which floated slimy, stagnant things, leaves and dead insects.

Pools more horrible even than the patch of liquidescent mud in which Colin was sinking!

But Starrie Chase would never have attained to the leadership that was his among the boys of Exmouth if there had been nothing in him but the savage--the petty, not the primitive savage--that persecuted chipmunks and old women. Now the hero who slept in the shadow of the savage was aroused and there was "something doing"!

Lying flat upon the pliant sapling he forced it down with his heaving chest, with every ounce of will and weight in his strong body.

The silvery trunk bent to the sinking boy like a white angel.

With a cry he flung his arms upward and grasped it. At the same moment Leon slid down and jumped to a comparatively firm spot of the quagmire.

The flexible young tree rebounded slowly with the weight lighter than his pendant from it--like a stone attached to the boom of a derrick.

In a few seconds it was almost upright, with Colin Estey, mud-plastered to his arm-pits, hanging on like an olive-green bough, his dilated eyes starting from his head, his face blanched to the gray-white of the friendly trunk.

"Slide down now, Col, an' jump--I'll stand by to give you a hand!" cried Leon, the daring rescuer.

And in another minute the victim was safe on _terra firma_--out of the slimy throat of Big Swamp.

"Oh! I thought I was going--to sink down--out of sight!" he gasped between lips that did not seem to move, so tightly was the skin of his face stretched by terror. "That I'd be swallowed by the mud! I would have been--but for Leon!"

"You surely were quick! Quick as a flash!" The two boys who had been spectators gazed open-mouthed at Starrie Chase as if they saw the hero who for three brief minutes had flashed out into the open.

"Whew! I got such a fright that I'll never forget it; I declare I feel weak still," mumbled Coombsie.

"Pooh! your fright--was nothing to mine," Colin's stiff lips began to tremble now with recovering life. "And I'm plastered with mud to my shoulder-blades--wet too! But I don't care, as I'm out of it!" He glanced nervously toward Big Swamp, and at the clump of restless alders which probably still sheltered Racc.o.o.n Junior.

"The sun is quite hot here; let's move back up the hill and sit down!"

Nixon pointed to the gra.s.sy slope behind them where the crows still flapped their wings around the chestnut-tree with an occasional relieved "Caw!" "We'll roll you over there, Col, and hang you out to dry!"

"Well! suppose we eat our lunch during the process, eh?" suggested Marcoo. "Goodness! wouldn't it be 'one on us' if a fox had sneaked out of the woods and run off with the lunch-basket? We left it under the chestnut-tree."

They made their way back to that nut-tree, whose h.o.a.ry trunk was still swathed with Leon's coat and the scout's Norfolk jacket, knotted round it to prevent the young c.o.o.n which had signally outwitted them from "lighting down."

"Whew! I feel as if 'twas low tide inside me. A scare always makes me hungry," remarked Leon, not at all like a hero, but a very prosaic boy.

"I think eating in the woods is the best part of the business!"

"I say! You'd make a jolly good scout; do you know it?" put forth Nixon.

But the other only hunched his shoulders with the grin of a contortionist as he bit into a ham sandwich, richly flavored with peanut b.u.t.ter and quince jelly from the shaking which the basket had undergone on its pa.s.sage through the woods.

The troop of hungry crows which had pecked unavailingly at the wicker cover, had retired to some distance and watched the picnic in croaking envy.