And, meantime, the log was sinking steadily. Inch by inch it was being submerged, and the mire was crawling up Buffalo Bill’s boot-legs.
The swamp was quite heavily wooded, so he was hidden from the view of anybody on the eminences around about. And, as he cast a worried glance about at the heights in fear that he might have attracted attention, he suddenly beheld the end of a tree branch almost over his head.
“Ah!” exclaimed he, and his eyes glistened as he followed the trend of this branch with their glance.
Of course, the branch was altogether too slight above his head to bear his weight, even could he reach it. But it promised something. He glanced along its length several times to the parent trunk some twenty feet away, and then began operations. There was, indeed, no time for him to lose, for the log was a good bit under the surface of the dimpling mud by this.
The fronded end of the branch was much too high for him to reach it with his hands; nor could he pull it down with his gun. Indeed, he got rid of that implement at once—it only weighed him down into the mire the faster—by tossing it into a crotch of the branch, where it fortunately chanced to catch and hang. He removed his belt, slipped the cartridges into the side pockets of his coat, tied his handkerchief to one end of the belt to make it longer, and then fastened one of his pistols to the handkerchief to weight the end. Swinging this weighted line, he cast the pistol about the small twigs above his head. The weapon caught in them, and gradually he drew the end of the branch down within the grasp of his hands.
He held this and fastened on his belt and gun again, buttoning his pockets so as not to lose his ammunition. The end of the branch was a bushy fan of small twigs and leaves. He could pull it down into the mud, and the green wood was tough and strong; but there was a big chance, when he bore any weight upon it, of the limb tearing off at the trunk.
However, swarming up this branch seemed the only way of escape from the smothering mud which already was as high as his knees. Its suction was terrific, too. When he flung himself forward on the branch he could scarcely drag his boots out of the mire.
But he fought on desperately, dragging up first one booted foot and then the other, and, although the limb cracked and he lay almost flat in the mud at first, he finally wormed his way up the branch to its bigger part. There he straddled it and waited to get his breath, and to scrape off some of the mud.
“A little more,” he puffed, “and I’d have gone down in that, and nobody would have been the wiser. Ah!”
He halted in his speech and stared down into the mud. An idea had smitten him, and he turned it over and over in his mind while he worked his way along the limb and descended to the foot of the tree.