Sadie tried to struggle and then gave a startled, strangled cry.
She had reached a deeper part of the marsh. She sank to her waist in muck and water and on her face was a look of stark panic that was terrible to see!
CHAPTER XXI
A REMEMBERED FACE
The next half hour proved to the three chums to be little less than a nightmare.
They had heard before of the treacherousness of a huckleberry swamp—there was such a swamp near their homes in which a boy and a girl had lost their lives—but never before had they realized what an inanimate monster such a swamp could be.
This present swamp was perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter. It lay low near one end of the island and was surrounded by huckleberry bushes from four to seven and even eight feet in height—sturdy bushes that in mid-summer bent low with their loads of fruit. In the swamp were numerous other bushes, with here and there tufts of coarse swamp grass. Between these bushes and tufts of grass was the treacherous ooze and slime into which the girls were rapidly sinking.
The more they struggled to free themselves, the more deeply they were caught. Their cries for help brought no response.
In their merry chase over the island they had run farther from the picnic grounds than they had thought. Or perhaps the other girls, not as lazy as they had pretended, had wandered off in another direction, putting still greater distance between them and the unfortunate victims in the swamp.
Exhausted between their cries for help and their efforts to free themselves from the muck and slime, the three girl chums finally gave up and stared at each other in helpless despair.