“Good deal depends on how his heart holds out. Doc’ Williams was saying—”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake!” boomed Mr. Sikes.
“As I was saying,” resumed Mrs. Grimes, “Lizzie was getting breakfast. I said I thought I’d go upstairs and lie down for an hour or two, and she says I’d better knock on Mr. Baxter’s door, ’cause she hadn’t heard him moving ’round, and his breakfast would be cold if he didn’t get a move on him. So I rapped on his door as I went by. Not a sound. I rapped again, and then I tried the door. Then I went in. He wasn’t there. His bed hadn’t been slept in. So I called Oliver October. It’s half-past eight now, and the boy’s been down at the swamp for nearly an hour. Do something! Go out and help him look—”
“I’ll take a look in the barn first. He may have gone up to the haymow to sleep,” said Sikes, and shuffled off, followed a moment later by Silas Link, who had stayed behind long enough to instruct Mrs. Grimes to telephone to the police and to the railway station.
The long and the short of it was, Oliver Baxter had vanished as completely as if swallowed by the earth—and it was the general opinion that that was exactly what happened to him. There was not the slightest doubt in the minds of his horrified friends that he had wandered out upon the swamp and had met a ghastly fate in one of the countless pits of mire whose depths no man knew or cared to fathom even in speculation.
These soft, oozy, slimy holes were located at the lower end of the swamp, nearly a mile from the Baxter home. The upper end had long been looked upon as reclaimable through drainage, but that portion surrounding the pond was a hopeless morass. Scientific men advanced the opinion that ages ago a vast lake had existed in this region, covering miles of territory. Death Swamp was all that was left of it; the rest had dried up through the processes of nature. Tradition had it that the pond was without bottom, but science in the shape of an adventurous surveyor demonstrated that the water was not more than a few feet deep at any point. However, this same surveyor was authority for the statement that the mud at the bottom of the pond was so soft and unresisting that he could not reach solid ground with the twenty-foot fishing pole with which he was equipped.
There were the usual stories, some verified, of horses and other animals straying into the swamp and sinking out of sight before the eyes of their owners—disappearing swiftly in what appeared to be a patch of firm, reed-covered earth.
CHAPTER XII
ONE WAY OF LOOKING AT IT
Notwithstanding the almost universal belief that poor old Oliver Baxter was buried in the black mire of the Swamp—there were some who said he was still sinking—a state-wide search was at once instituted by his distracted son, who, for one, did not believe that the missing man had gone to his death in the loathesome tract. Before the sun had set on that bleak though sunlit day, telephone and telegraph wires carried the news to all nearby towns, villages and farms. Railway trains and interurban cars were searched; the woods and the fields for miles around were combed and the highways watched.