Though February had not quite gone and it was still winter according to the calendar, already wild violets were peeping through the frost-browned wiregrass and dogwood and honeysuckle blossoms were perfuming the air in the long-leaf pine forests which surrounded the farm and seemed to have no end. To Ted there was nothing novel in these vast stretches of pine woods as level as a floor, but to Hubert, who had known only the North Carolina hills, the south Georgia country was almost like a new world. The boys spent most of the day hunting in the woods about the farm, but came home disappointed, having seen few quail or doves and bagged practically nothing.
"To-morrow we'll take a look at the Okefinokee and hunt along the edge of it," proposed Ted at supper.
Hubert agreed, adding, as "Aunt" Clarissa offered them more hot waffles: "And if we get tired of that, we'll go to town and see Cousin Jim."
When they were about to start off next morning Hubert critically called attention to the fact that Ted was still dressed in his khaki. "Are you going to wear that all the time?" he asked.
"Why shouldn't I if I like? In a way I am in the government's service and this is my uniform." Ted spoke quite seriously.
"You in the government's service!" scoffed Hubert.
"Didn't you know the President has made all the Boy Scouts dispatch bearers? When I get the pamphlets I am to distribute, you'll see me in the service all right."
Hubert soon forgot his skepticism and envy in the interest he found in their expedition. Inquiring the way from a negro encountered on the public road, the boys tramped straight in the direction of the great swamp. For about three miles the path led through open, level, wiregrass-carpeted pine woods; then gradually a downward slope was perceived and soon the straggling pines were succeeded by a dense "hammock" growth, thick with underbrush, reeds and brambles, the ground becoming damp and spongy, and the more open spaces being often little more than sloppy bogs around which the young adventurers picked their way.
The great Okefinokee Swamp, formerly some forty miles long by twenty-five wide with a vast surrounding acreage of untouched pine barrens, has been to some extent reclaimed by advancing settlement, local drainage, and the invasion at points of the insatiable lumberman; but even when Ted and Hubert entered its borders the greater part of it was still a wild and almost pathless acreage of tangled forest-grown bottom lands, flooded jungles, watery "prairies" or marshes, remote lakes, sluggish streams, and pine-covered islands. More than a hundred years ago a story was current that it had been the last refuge of the ancient Yemassees, an Indian race that disappeared before the march of the conquering Creeks. It is well known to have been a stronghold of the Seminoles during the Florida-Indian wars as well as to have furnished a secure hiding place for deserters from the Confederate army during the Civil War, and even in the year 1917 fugitives from the draft law could have found no more remote and safe retreat than its inner recesses afforded.
At points the line of demarcation between the surrounding pine woods and the outer reaches of the swamp itself is by no means clear. A considerable acreage of low swampy land is nothing uncommon anywhere in the long-leaf pine section of southern Georgia. Ted had often seen such low areas far from the great swamp, and so now, without realizing what he did, he pushed forward into a section of the Okefinokee itself. The point where the boys entered was thickly grown with cypress and covered in considerable part with shallow water through which they waded. This was nothing alarming, hunting in that section with dry feet being practically out of the question.