“I’ve got to get out of here and get warm before I can even think,” Scott replied. His lips were blue and he was shivering so that he could hardly talk. “I wonder if we could not find a log or something over there on that quicksand where we could get in the sun without being in plain sight of any one who came along?”
They waded over toward the quicksand, feeling their way cautiously and expecting every minute to feel the sand giving way beneath them. A large tree which had fallen with its stump on the solid ground and its top buried in the quicksand offered them just the kind of place they wanted. They crawled quickly on to the fallen trunk and then eagerly out into the sunlight.
“Gee! doesn’t that sun feel fine?” Murphy chattered. “I wish we dared to build a fire. I don’t feel as though I could ever get warm clear through again.”
Of course they did not dare to build a fire and were obliged to content themselves with sitting in the sunlight and beating themselves with their arms to try to stimulate their tardy circulations. It was about a quarter of an hour before their teeth ceased to chatter and they began to feel at all comfortable.
“Now then,” Scott said, basking flat on the log so that he could soak up as much warmth as possible, “which shall it be? Wait here till dark and then try to run the gauntlet up around that neck they have been watching, make a break now to the west and take a chance on getting away before Qualley comes back, or have a try at crossing this swamp?”
Murphy threw a disgusted look at the cold swamp in which he had been soaking for the last half-hour and showed very clearly that no matter what he might think of any of the other schemes he would prefer anything to any more wading. “Gosh!” he exclaimed suddenly with so much feeling that Scott straightened up to see what had happened, “I’d sure hate to be an alligator. Don’t like that plan of going up around that neck much better either. No telling how long they might leave a guard hanging around up there. I’m for a break to the west. There would not be so much uncertainty about that. We’d either make it, or we wouldn’t,” he added with a shrug.
“Might try Qualley’s raft scheme,” Scott suggested.
“Nothing doing!” Murphy exclaimed emphatically. “That would be worse than trying the neck. It would take us hours to float across there and Qualley might come back and practice some long-distance target shooting on us for an hour or so. Even if he missed us he could go around to the head of the cape and catch us when we came out. No, that does not appeal to me.”
As a matter of fact it did not appeal to Scott either. Like Murphy he was in favor of staking everything on a dash to the west. If Qualley did not happen to see them right at the start they would be comparatively safe for the rest of the way. He had wanted to try the swamp till he had found how cold the water could get, now he felt that he would very much prefer being shot.
“All right, then,” he agreed, “let’s make a break for it. We ought to hunt up a log like this or something of the sort where we could get out of here without leaving a trail right on the edge of it, and we better work our way up to that point so that we can see that no one is right on hand to see us start.”