Their weariness and sharp hunger were the only certain indications of the flight of time, but as the light began to wane the boys realized that they had been on the marsh for hours and had not landed on the island till late in the afternoon. It was now necessary to make some sort of preparation for the night, and that speedily. An attempt to build a fire had failed, the wet matches refusing even to ignite, and as the gun was also wet and the shells soaked, there appeared to be no hope of obtaining even the raw flesh of a bird for supper, supposing they could have eaten it.
Tears appeared in shivering Hubert's eyes and rolled slowly down his cheeks, seeing which Ted smiled and tried hard to make merry with a little jest.
"Now, Hu, we've had enough water for one day without pumping up any more," he said, patting his cousin affectionately on the shoulder.
"Well, you know," said Hubert, trying to smile in response, "I never did have a good grip on my what-you-may-call-'em ducts, and this is pretty tough, as you know. I really am trying hard to stand it and not be a baby. I'm glad we didn't have such a dose as this the first day in the swamp—I'd have boo-hooed sure enough. I'm not quite the baby that I was."
"No, you are not, Hu; you are getting to be quite a man," said Ted gently, and Hubert, struggling hard to sit on the lid of his lachrymal ducts, so to speak, was very grateful.
A few moments later he smilingly announced that he had succeeded in "turning off the water," but he feared that he had spoken too soon when suddenly Ted, moving about, very nearly stepped on a large moccasin and found some difficulty in killing it with his long stick. Hubert suffered from an instinctive horror of snakes and the episode almost upset him.
Ted had heard the slackers describe how they made shift for the night when they had to camp out on a marsh island or on a damp tussock in the flooded forests, and he now proceeded to strip bark off the cypress trees with the aid of the hatchet. This was spread on the ground under quantities of Spanish moss which was to be used as both bed and covering. The moss was damp, water-soaked, in fact; but even so they would be warmer covered with it than if they lay exposed to the currents of raw air.
By the time these preparations were completed it was dark. Ted thought they ought to remain awake and keep more or less active all night, in order to stave off severe colds; but they were both too exhausted to persevere in such efforts. Seated on the cushioned cypress bark, and leaning their backs against a tree, the wet moss drawn up over them, they soon subsided into quiet of limb and tongue, and after a long while fell into troubled, dream-haunted slumber.
"We'll never get home," moaned Hubert, breaking down at last, while still they talked, sitting there in the thick darkness.
Ted made no reply at once. He was thinking how different had been the experience of the heroes of romance wrecked on unknown islands or lost in desolate places. None of these, so far as he could remember, had ever suffered such continuing miseries of body and mind as he and Hubert had to endure; there always seemed to be a wreck at hand with plenty of good things on board to eat, and the castaways could at least manage to sleep warm and dry.