Nickie shrugged his shoulders. “The next thing we gotta think of is chow.”
Skippy grinned. “We got lots of mud—nothing but. Gee whiz, I’m hungry.”
“It’s too bad we couldn’t ’a’ knocked off that blamed owl, hah? We’d ’a’ got some sleep maybe an’ we’d ’a’ had some breakfast on his fat neck.”
They started off with high hopes. It was all a chance, Skippy reasoned, and they hadn’t any idea what direction would be best. The thing to do, then, was to go and keep on going, trusting to luck that they would come out somewhere.
They wallowed through miles and miles of mud, trying with long sticks each dubious looking stretch of swamp in their path. Often they were forced to turn back and circle great pools of silent black water where on the thick green scum the thin rays of sunlight smiled in derision.
And then noonday arrived, with the sun hot and mocking directly over the tops of the trees. Below in Devil’s Bog was a steaming heat that seemed to hiss out of the black, miry ground and every stir of air soon lost its freshness in the dank smell of the place.
Toward mid-afternoon Nickie lost his head a little. “S’pose we shouldn’t get out, kid?” he cried. “S’pose we should go on like this for days—we’d starve—we’d be eaten up with them mosquitoes or somethin’.”
Skippy tried to laugh. “I’d rather be eaten up with somethin’, Nickie—honest!”
“Aw, I know, kid. Here, I’m older’n you—I shouldn’t lose my head. Looks like I’m yeller, hah?”
“Go on—it looks like you’re mud and so’m I. Gee whiz, my aunt’d have a fit if she could see this suit. She paid six bucks for it on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street.”