But the speed of the limping wild animal enabled it, having gained its short legs--despite the injury of the stone--to reach the shelter of a quivering clump of alders where Blink worried in and out in vain, nose to the ground--sniffing and baffled. "Oh, we've lost sight of him now! He's given us the slip," cried Colin, recklessly dashing for the alders. Suddenly the air cracked with his cry that raved with terror like the crows: "Help! _Help!_ I'm into it now--into it plunk--into Big Swamp! I'm sinking--s-sinking above my waist! Help! Help!" CHAPTER IV VARNEY'S PAINTPOT "I'm 'plunk' into it! I'm sinking in the swamp mud! I can't--can't get out! Oh--h-help--help!" Colin's wild cries as he found himself sinking in the oozing, olive-green mud of the vast alder-swamp, struck his comrades with a momentary blind horror. The half-immersed boy was indeed "plunk" into it; he was submerged to his waist and slowly sinking inch by inch farther, now fairly gibbering in his frantic terror of being swallowed bodily by one of the many sucking throats of Big Swamp. He writhed and struggled madly, snatching at the rank grass whose slimy roots came away in his hand--at the bushes--even at the brilliant poison sumac, already ruddy as a swamp lamp--with the clutch of a drowning man; Leon's remembered words stinging his ears like noisome insects: "There are _live_ spots in that swamp where one might go out of sight--_quick_!" The hideous slimy life of the spongy bog, half water, half mud! Leon's sharp-featured face at that moment seemed to be carved out of pale wood as his snapping eyes took in the swamp, with its groves of whispering alders, its margin of scattered birch-trees and swamp cedars, the lamplike sumac burning maliciously--the sinking boyish figure amid the moist green dreariness! Now, Starrie Chase was by Nature's gift more quick-witted than his companions, even than the trained boy scout. "If we try to wade in toward him, we'll sink ourselves!" he cried. "I'll try to haul him out with that birch-tree." A leaping, plunging run, sinking to his ankles, and with the long bound of a gray squirrel he alighted upon the supple trunk of a tall white-birch sapling that grew within the borders of the swamp! No squirrel ever climbed more rapidly than did he to its middle branches. And the yellow flame in his eyes, now, was not a spark from persecution's fire. [Illustration: "HELP! _HELP!_"] "Hold on, Col! Keep up! The tree'll pull you out. I'll bend it down to you. When it comes within reach of your arms catch hold of the trunk! Hang on for your life! I'll shin down, and 'twill hoist you up--you're lighter than I am!" He was bending the tall, supple trunk, with its leafy crown, down--down--as he spoke. It creaked beneath his fifteen-year-old weight. The strained roots groaned in the swampy soil.