“I—I don’t know,” confessed Spud miserably. He was shaking a bit. “They’ll send out searching parties when we fail to show up to-night. Do you s’pose they’ll come over this way?”
Billy made a wry face that instantly resolved into a grimace of pain because of his swollen features. “No, I don’t,” he replied. “You see I let some of the fellers think that we was goin’ over toward Old Baldy, and you know some of ’em saw us start out on the Baldy trail. They’ll go huntin’ over that way. Spud, we might just as well make up our minds right now that we’ve got to spend the night in the woods. In the mornin’ we can shin up a tall tree and p’raps get our bearings. What we want to do now is to make ourselves as comfortable as we can, and the first thing I’m goin’ to do is to get some mud.”
“Mud! What for?” asked Spud in surprise.
“To plaster on these blamed stings,” replied Billy. “Jerusalem, how my face aches! Just a little bit back there we came across a swampy place. Come on and see if we can find it.”
Retracing their steps in the direction from which they had made their last mad flight they soon found the place Billy had noticed. With hasty fingers he dug up the wet black muck and plastered it thick over his swollen face and on his hands and legs. Somewhat gingerly Spud followed his example. The cool, moist plasters brought almost instant relief, and with the easing of the smarting wounds a measure of steadiness returned to the shaken nerves. Spud even so far forgot his fears as to grin as he looked at Billy.
“Gee, you are a sight! Say, the fellows wouldn’t do a thing if they could see you now! The wild man of Borneo would be a beaut ’side of you.”
“Can’t have much on you,” replied Billy. “That eye of yours looks as if it was about closed up, and mud ain’t becoming to your style of beauty. Now let’s make camp before it gets so dark we can’t see nothin’.”
“Where’ll we make it, right here?” asked Spud.
“No,” replied Billy decidedly. “It’s too wet. We’ve got to get on higher ground.”
He stooped and began to make a big ball of mud.