“Absolutely none. One step off shore and a person would go into the sands up to his waist. To get out, when once entrapped in the sand, would be an utter impossibility. The sand sucks a person down and down, until he is smothered and buried. Quicksand Lake not only takes a man’s life, but also furnishes him with a grave.”
“The men we are looking for must have some way of crossing back and forth,” observed the scout.
“Then they must have some sort of a drawbridge,” commented the girl, “for the sands could not be crossed unless a person had something to walk on.”
“You and Cayuse stay here and take care of the prisoners and the horses, Dell, while I investigate.”
Leaving Bear Paw in charge of Cayuse, Buffalo Bill went down toward the shore of the strange lake, Dell warning him as he went to be careful and not step off the bank.
There was some need of this caution, for the scout found that the solid earth merged gradually into the bubbling sand, and that one reckless step might prove a person’s undoing.
In the moonlight the lake was an odd sight. The sands that composed it seemed in constant motion, bubbling and rippling from some underlying force. It was very like the “jumping quicksands” of the Bad Lands, with which the scout was familiar, only here there were no gliding hillocks, but minute ridges like small waves.
No doubt there were springs under the whole extent of the lake, and the water impregnated the sand and gave it its motion.
As far as the scout could see, the slope to the quicksands was an easy one. A dark mass, rising clear of the sands off on the right, impressed the scout as being the island, and he moved in that direction.
He stopped before he came opposite the island, for there was an object on the bank of the lake which claimed his attention. This object was a buckboard—McGowan’s buckboard, undoubtedly, and the one in which Hendricks had spirited Annie McGowan to that rendezvous in Quicksand Lake.