In hopes of striking the trail again they decided to fetch a circle all around the morass, but this device failed. Perhaps the tracks of the thieves had disappeared in the half-liquid mud. Perhaps the men had taken pains to pick their way on pieces of fallen timber. They struck a still wider circle without any more success, and they had to steer so crooked a course through the swamp that when they thought themselves back at the starting-point they failed to find the flowed tract they had crossed.
“Lost—there’s no doubt about it!” exclaimed Bob, halting.
All the swamp looked queer and strange about them. They had not been at that place before. The trees were so dense that they could hardly see the sky, but the sun looked somewhat out of place.
“I dunno where we is,” said Sam. “But I knows where de old channel is. I kin go straight there, yes-suh.”
They debated for some minutes, and then started to find the old channel to make a fresh start. Sam started with a great deal of confidence, but within fifteen minutes they came to a slough of what seemed bottomless mud. Stiff-leaved palmetto grew on hard spots, mixed with small, dense titi shrubbery, and red-tipped cypress knees thrust themselves out of the morass, like strange fungi. Half-sunken fallen trees lay all over the surface, offering a possible way across; and for a hundred yards they scrambled through this nauseous jungle, clinging to the shrubs and jumping from log to log. But the farther they went the worse the traveling seemed to get.
“We’ll have to give this up,” said Joe at last. “Let’s try to get back to high ground and get our bearings again.”
But it was as hard now to get back as to go forward, and they were so shut in by the swamp that they had very little idea in which direction the high ground lay. Almost at random, they made an angle to the right. They no longer knew whether they were going toward the river or away from it. The swamp had them trapped. Mosquitoes hung about them in clouds. They were wet and mud-covered and scratched with thorns, and the continual sudden dart and wriggle of a moccasin snake every few minutes kept them in a state of nervous tension. A moccasin’s bite is not usually fatal, but it is very sickening, and it would have been no joke for one of them to have been bitten while they were snared in the labyrinth. They had almost reached the point of exhaustion and despair when they came to a really dry spot, like an island in the swamp, grown over thickly with palmetto; and here they stopped to rest.
The sun still appeared somewhat out of place in the heavens, but from its height the day must be getting toward noon. Sam volunteered to climb the highest tree within reach and reconnoiter. He came down reporting that the ground seemed to rise not very far away to the left, and they started forward again. The maze of marsh and jungle continued. Twice they had to wade thigh-deep across bayous—or perhaps the same bayou—and they were all losing faith in the new course, when they came out upon the shore of a deep stream perhaps twenty feet wide, heavily overshadowed with trees.
“Surely this isn’t the channel,” said Bob.
“Too narrow, I think,” said Joe doubtfully. There was a fairly strong current running, however, which indicated that the stream at any rate communicated with one of the great channels. There was comparatively solid ground along the shore, and they walked up the stream a little way, when Sam suddenly stopped and sniffed the air.