"Lors, Miss Emma, it's my fault altogeder. I should n' neber told ye. An' as for gwine back, it's jus' as bad as torrer."
"We can't stay here all night! Oh, I'm right tired out! If I could lie down"——
"'Twouldn' do no way, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a fright for her friend, as a quick, poisonous-looking lizard slid along the log, like a streak of light, in the wake of a spider which was one blotch of scarlet venom.
Far ahead, the strong sun, piercing the marsh, drew up a vapor, that, blue as any distant haze in one part and lint-white in another, made itself aslant into low, delicious, broken prisms, melting all between. This, more than anything else, told the extent of the bog before them, and, hot as it was now, betrayed the deathly chill lurking under such a coverlet at night. In every other direction lay the cypress jungle; and whether they saw the front or back of Longfer Hill, and on which side the river ran, steering for which they could steer for home, they had not the skill to say. Thus, what way to go they still were undecided, when, at something moving near them, they started to their feet in a faint terror, delaying only a single instant to gaze at it,—a serpent, that, coiled round the stem above, had previously seemed nothing but a splendid parasite, and that just lifted its hooded head crusted with gems, and flickered a long cleft tongue of flame over them, while loosening in great loops from its basking-place. They vouchsafed it no second look, but, with one leap over the log, through the black mire, and from clump to clump of moss, sped away,—if that could be called speed which was hindered at each moment by waylaying briers and entangling ropes of blossoming vines, by delays in threatening quagmires and bewilderments in thickets beset by clouds of insects, by trips and stumbles and falls and bruises, and many a pause for tears and complaints and ejaculations of despair.
Meanwhile the heat of the day was mitigated by thin clouds sliding over the sun and banking up the horizon, though the hot wind still blew sweetly and steadily from the open quarter of the sky.
"Oh, what has become of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about them they could detect no path.
"We's los' into de swamp, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a kind of gloomy defiance of the worst of it,—"da' 's all."
"And here we shall die!" cried the other.
And she flung herself, face down, upon the floor.
Flor was beside her instantly, taking her head upon her knee. Her own heart was sinking like lead; but she plucked it up, and for the other's sake snapped her fingers at Fortune.