The child clung to him desperately, but she did not cry. Stoical, from her Indian blood, perhaps, she gazed at him in a sort of wild silence.
“Never mind, petite!” said Carl. “I’ll get you safe out of it yet.”
But he could not see how it was to be done. If he had a couple of planks, to be laid down and moved forward alternately, he thought he might bridge a way over the slough. He hastened into the cabin again, to see if there was any loose board that he could wrench off. He could find nothing movable that would answer the purpose. The place was littered with scraps of rubbish not worth taking away—a few old muskrat skins, scraps of clothing, a torn blanket, and an old pair of snowshoes.
The sight of the snow-shoes now gave him an inspiration. He ran out with them and hastily bound them on.
“Here, little one, climb on pick-a-back!” he exclaimed, stooping, and the child obeyed, understanding his gesture if not his words. With her arms around his neck, clasping her feet firmly, he trudged awkwardly out into the weeds of the marsh-edge.
A hurricane of sparks, hot ashes, and bits of burning wood swept over him as a clump of burning trees crashed down close to the shore. He had no difficulty in getting across the first twenty or thirty feet of the slough; the tufts of grass supported him easily. Then the vegetation grew more scanty. It almost ceased, and there were stretches of bare mud, sometimes thinly caked on the surface, sometimes supporting straggly weeds that looked like streaks of green foam.
Fortunately both Carl and the little girl were light weights. Together they weighed less than two hundred pounds, and Carl was overjoyed to find that the snow-shoes held him up whenever there was the smallest scrap of vegetation to bind the mud. The meshes were old and torn. Brown water bubbled up between them, but they supported the weight as long as he did not pause. As he went farther he had to step more and more quickly to keep from sinking, till at last he was forced into a run. Sinking deeper and deeper at every stride, the snow-shoes scattered the mud in great flakes.
Suddenly he tripped. Overbalanced by the weight on his shoulders, he went sprawling. He clutched at the little girl, who had shot over his head, and dragged her out of an oozy pool. Then a yard away, he spied a rotten log half sunk in the mire, and floundered to it.
On this support he hesitated for a few minutes. Both he and the little girl were covered with mud from head to foot. The shore behind him, was veiled in smoke and he could not yet see the river. He seemed shut off, isolated on that quagmire, in the midst of dimness.
All at once the signal shots banged again, sounding less than fifty yards away. Carl screamed wildly in answer, and, taking the child on his back, started forward again. But the footing became more and more treacherous. He sank at every step, and the mud flowed over his snow-shoes and weighted them down. It was only by great efforts that he avoided being stuck fast.