The old rallying cry timed his efforts: it was like one man standing the scrimmage of a pack of forwards in football. The bog gave an ounch of release, like a beast smacking its lips. He got hold of something on the bank. It had prickles on it, but it was solid and grew in dryness. Then as he put his weight upon it, it came out of the ground by the roots: a little avalanche of earth and stones came over his head, blinding him for the moment with grit in his eyes.
He could not see; he could only flounder forward with spread arms which availed nothing: the bog had him fast for all his effort.
Then his hand touched a liane brought down by the bush. It was a double liane, tough as flax and as thick as honeysuckle. He caught it and pulled on it, and instantly a great flowering spray of xicale flowers came floundering down from above, into his face. He saw them for what they were. “Xicale flowers,” he said, “xicales. I’m going to be saved.”
He got both hands deeply into the lianes of the xicales and pulled as he had never pulled, never, on any yard or on any rope. Digging forward into the squash of the bog he found something hard for one foot. “Oh, heave,” he cried, as he had so often cried to his watch. “Oh, heave, son, heave; oh, heave and start her; heave for glory.”
He found himself half out, with his right knee and side on hard earth and his left leg stuck in the bog. He drew deep breath for a minute, as once he had stopped to breathe when beaten dead by a sail five years before. Then gathering all his powers, he hove “all together,” and emerged erect on sound earth, shaking with the strain, and without his left shoe.
“Xicales,” he said, “you’ve saved my life. I knew that you were mixed up somehow with my life; and I’ll carry some of you with me in gratitude till I’m laid in my grave.”
He picked both flowers and leaves for his soaking pocket-book. His hands shook: he was cold to the marrow and filthy beyond description.
“I’ll do it yet,” he said. “But first I must make a shoe of sorts, or I shall be lamed.”
He cut off his trouser-legs at the knees, with his knife. With one of the pieces, folded fourfold, he made a shoe, and with the other he made thongs which secured it as a sandal to his foot. It was a rough and ready sandal, but it stayed on when put. It was good enough to run on.
He did not think of what the time might be. He roughly judged that he could reach Las Palomas in twenty minutes or twenty-five minutes by running along the beach with all his might. Any waterman on the front would put him aboard: the police-launch would take him. “I can’t miss my passage,” he said, “I must be on board. I told the old man I would be on board.” For the first time he said to himself, “And the old man will give me an hour’s grace.”