CHAPTER
10
INSIDE THE WOODSHED
The throaty croak of frogs filled the night as Salt, car headlights darkened, brought up at a bend of the road near the swamp’s edge.
Entrance to the pinelands could be gained in any one of three ways. A road, often mired with mud, had been built by a lumber mill, and led for nearly a mile into the higher section of the area. There it ended abruptly.
Half a mile away, near Trapper Joe’s shack, lay the water course Penny and Louise had followed. From it branched a maze of confusing channels, one of which marked the way to the heart of the swamp. But only a few persons ever had ventured beyond Lookout Island, close to the exit.
The third entrance, also not far from Trapper Joe’s, consisted of a narrow boardwalk path nailed to fallen trees and stumps just above the water level. The walk had fallen into decay and could be used for only five hundred feet.
“Seems like a funny time for a truck to be coming out of the swamp road,” Salt remarked, peering into the gloom of the pine trees. “Hear anything?”
Penny listened intently and shook her head. But a moment later, she explained: “Now I do! The truck’s coming this way.”
“Let’s get closer to the road exit,” Salt proposed. “We’d better leave the car here, if we don’t want to be seen.”
Penny’s high heels kept twisting on the rutty road, and finally in exasperation, she took them off, stripped away her stockings, and walked in her bare feet.
The truck now was very close and the pair could hear its laboring engine. Salt drew Penny back against the bottle-shaped trunk of a big tree at the road exitway. There they waited.