“Is that the shoe Sahwah had on this morning?” asked Nyoda.
“Yes,” said Hinpoha. “I remember asking her why she wore those shoes with the red buttons to run around in and she said they were getting tight and she wanted to wear them out.”
“Where does that black mud come from around here?” asked Gladys.
It was Nyoda who guessed the dreadful fact first. All of a sudden she remembered cleaning her shoes after she had come home from her visit to Uncle Peter.
“The marsh!” she gasped. “Sahwah’s caught in the marsh! It’s the same mud. I went to the edge of the marsh the other day to see it and got some on my shoe.”
Without stopping to hear more, Calvin dashed off in the direction of his father’s farm, with Pointer at his heels and Gladys and Nyoda and Hinpoha and Migwan and Tom and Betty trailing after him as fast as they could go. Mrs. Gardiner followed a little distance behind. She could not keep up with them. Calvin tore a flat board from one of the fences as he ran along and called on the others to do the same thing. A little farther on he found a rope and took that along. They reached the edge of the marsh and looked eagerly for the figure of Sahwah imprisoned in the treacherous ooze. But the green surface smiled up innocently at them. Not a sign of a struggle, no indentation in the level, no break. To the unknowing it looked like the smoothest lawn lying like a sheet of emerald in the sun. But on second glance you saw the water bubbling up through the grass and then you knew the secret of the greenness. Nowhere could they see Sahwah.
Migwan had to force herself to ask the question that was in everybody’s mind. “Has she gone under?”
“No,” said Calvin, positively. “It can’t be possible in so short a time. They say that a horse went down here once long ago, and it took him more than two days to be covered entirely.”
After being wrought up to such a pitch of expectancy it was a shock to find that Sahwah was not in the marsh. But how had her shoe come to be covered with marsh mud, and what was it doing off her foot? Where had Pointer found it?
“Oh, if only dogs could speak!” said Hinpoha. “Pointer, Pointer, where did you find it?” But Pointer could only wag his tail and bark.