CHAPTER IV
VARNEY’S PAINTPOT
“I’m ‘plunk’ into it! I’m sinking in the swamp mud! I can’t—can’t get out! Oh—h-help—help!”
Colin’s wild cries as he found himself sinking in the oozing, olive-green mud of the vast alder-swamp, struck his comrades with a momentary blind horror.
The half-immersed boy was indeed “plunk” into it; he was submerged to his waist and slowly sinking inch by inch farther, now fairly gibbering in his frantic terror of being swallowed bodily by one of the many sucking throats of Big Swamp.
He writhed and struggled madly, snatching at the rank grass whose slimy roots came away in his hand—at the bushes—even at the brilliant poison sumac, already ruddy as a swamp lamp—with the clutch of a drowning man; Leon’s remembered words stinging his ears like noisome insects: “There are live spots in that swamp where one might go out of sight—quick! ”
The hideous slimy life of the spongy bog, half water, half mud!
Leon’s sharp-featured face at that moment seemed to be carved out of pale wood as his snapping eyes took in the swamp, with its groves of whispering alders, its margin of scattered birch-trees and swamp cedars, the lamplike sumac burning maliciously—the sinking boyish figure amid the moist green dreariness!
Now, Starrie Chase was by Nature’s gift more quick-witted than his companions, even than the trained boy scout.