“If we try to wade in toward him, we’ll sink ourselves!” he cried. “I’ll try to haul him out with that birch-tree.”
A leaping, plunging run, sinking to his ankles, and with the long bound of a gray squirrel he alighted upon the supple trunk of a tall white-birch sapling that grew within the borders of the swamp!
No squirrel ever climbed more rapidly than did he to its middle branches.
And the yellow flame in his eyes, now, was not a spark from persecution’s fire.
| “HELP! HELP!” |
“Hold on, Col! Keep up! The tree’ll pull you out. I’ll bend it down to you. When it comes within reach of your arms catch hold of the trunk! Hang on for your life! I’ll shin down, and ’twill hoist you up—you’re lighter than I am!”
He was bending the tall, supple trunk, with its leafy crown, down—down—as he spoke. It creaked beneath his fifteen-year-old weight. The strained roots groaned in the swampy soil.
“Gee! if the roots should give way I’ll land in the soup too,” was his piercing thought; and a shudder ran down his spine as he saw the pools of olive-green bog-soup beneath him—bottomless pools—in which floated slimy, stagnant things, leaves and dead insects.
Pools more horrible even than the patch of liquidescent mud in which Colin was sinking!