"Gee! if the roots should give way _I'll_ land in the soup too," was his piercing thought; and a shudder ran down his spine as he saw the pools of olive-green bog-soup beneath him--bottomless pools--in which floated slimy, stagnant things, leaves and dead insects. Pools more horrible even than the patch of liquidescent mud in which Colin was sinking! But Starrie Chase would never have attained to the leadership that was his among the boys of Exmouth if there had been nothing in him but the savage--the petty, not the primitive savage--that persecuted chipmunks and old women. Now the hero who slept in the shadow of the savage was aroused and there was "something doing"! Lying flat upon the pliant sapling he forced it down with his heaving chest, with every ounce of will and weight in his strong body. The silvery trunk bent to the sinking boy like a white angel. With a cry he flung his arms upward and grasped it. At the same moment Leon slid down and jumped to a comparatively firm spot of the quagmire. The flexible young tree rebounded slowly with the weight lighter than his pendant from it--like a stone attached to the boom of a derrick. In a few seconds it was almost upright, with Colin Estey, mud-plastered to his arm-pits, hanging on like an olive-green bough, his dilated eyes starting from his head, his face blanched to the gray-white of the friendly trunk. "Slide down now, Col, an' jump--I'll stand by to give you a hand!" cried Leon, the daring rescuer. And in another minute the victim was safe on _terra firma_--out of the slimy throat of Big Swamp. "Oh! I thought I was going--to sink down--out of sight!" he gasped between lips that did not seem to move, so tightly was the skin of his face stretched by terror. "That I'd be swallowed by the mud! I would have been--but for Leon!" "You surely were quick! Quick as a flash!" The two boys who had been spectators gazed open-mouthed at Starrie Chase as if they saw the hero who for three brief minutes had flashed out into the open. "Whew! I got such a fright that I'll never forget it; I declare I feel weak still," mumbled Coombsie. "Pooh! your fright--was nothing to mine," Colin's stiff lips began to tremble now with recovering life. "And I'm plastered with mud to my shoulder-blades--wet too! But I don't care, as I'm out of it!" He glanced nervously toward Big Swamp, and at the clump of restless alders which probably still sheltered Raccoon Junior. "The sun is quite hot here; let's move back up the hill and sit down!" Nixon pointed to the grassy slope behind them where the crows still flapped their wings around the chestnut-tree with an occasional relieved "Caw!" "We'll roll you over there, Col, and hang you out to dry!" "Well! suppose we eat our lunch during the process, eh?" suggested Marcoo. "Goodness! wouldn't it be 'one on us' if a fox had sneaked out of the woods and run off with the lunch-basket? We left it under the chestnut-tree."