They were all moving again now and he felt certain that they must have passed the place where he had left Murphy. He stopped and listened in silence till long after all sound of the rest of them had died away in the distance. He waited a moment longer and then hissed cautiously. The response was so immediate and so close that he almost jumped out of his skin.
“Begorra,” Murphy exclaimed in a relieved tone as he stepped out from behind a tree close beside Scott, “that’s the first time I ever pointed a loaded gun at a friend, but you been looking down the barrel of my old Luger for the last five minutes and didn’t know it. If you had not made some signal or something pretty quick I’d have blown up.”
“Gee!” Scott exclaimed, grasping Murphy’s hand and sitting suddenly on the ground, “I think I would have felt better if you had shot me. I have been so afraid you would hail those other fellows when they came along that it has just about made me sick. I feel as limp as a dishrag.”
“I came mighty near doing just that thing, too,” Murphy replied cheerfully. “I had my mouth all puckered up to ask you what had kept you so long when one of them spoke. I was already sitting down or I would have dropped same as you did.”
“I was wishing mighty hard that I had taken your pistol as you wanted me to. I saw my mistake when I discovered that those fellows might run on to you here in the dark, shoot you and have it all over before I could ever get near enough to them to do anything.”
“Pretty handy thing to have when you are dealing with a bunch like that,” Murphy said. “But tell me all about it. Where have you been all this time and what happened? Where are those guys going?”
Scott thought a second. “It’s a pretty long story but I guess this is as good a place to tell it as any unless we want to hurry on after those fellows and get ourselves shot.” He went on to tell Murphy all that he had overheard at the camp fire, how their retreat was already cut off from the canal, and how those men who had just passed were on their way to head them off and shoot them if they attempted to make their way around the head of the swamp. When he mentioned Qualley’s name Murphy almost cried aloud.
“To think of the hours that old scoundrel has sat down there in the brush with me and watched to see if he could catch himself stealing logs out of that pond!” Murphy exclaimed angrily. “If I ever catch up with him I’ll punch his head for that if it is my last act.”
“Now the question for us to decide,” Scott said thoughtfully, “is what we are going to do? How are we going to get out of this place? We have been two years getting in here and it looks as though we might be a long time getting out.”
Murphy thought about it for a moment. “We might go west from here instead of east as they expect us to and then go north cross-country till we strike the main line railroad. It would be a long way around and I do not know anything about that country. No telling how many swamps we would get tangled up in or whom we might meet on the way, but it ought to be fairly safe.”