“Dat’s de las’ big puddle, niggers,” Mobile informed them. “Now go straight an’ wade eve’ything you come to!” The ingenuity of the Spanish inquisition devised no tortures comparable to the possibilities of pain arising from a forced flight through a Louisiana jungle. A vine trailing the ground for hundreds of yards in some mysterious manner wraps three times around a man’s leg, trips him, and leaves him to struggle with a bond which he cannot unwrap, cannot break, and cannot cut with a sharp pocket-knife. Wild rose vines with thorns like spear-points and barbed like a fishhook snag the garments and the skin, and, like Shylock, demand their pound of flesh. Hidden in every puddle of water, the hard, sharp cypress knees lie ambushed in the mud like bayonets to impale anything which falls upon them. Overhead, thorn-armed vines and the drooping branches of the dreadful prickly ash hang down to retard man’s progress and augument his anguish. In every damp spot the deadly moccasin lurks; by every decayed stump and root the venomous cottonmouth guards its den; insects thrashed up by the agitation of the grass and weeds rise like an Egyptian plague and blind the eyes and fill the nostrils and choke the throat. And through it all, mud which bogs the runner to his knees; at every twenty steps a pool of water and mire, which may be shallow enough for a sparrow to wade without wetting his feathers, or as deep as a well; and poison ivy, growing waist high, saturating man’s garments with its vitriol juices, and burning the flesh as if the runner were wading in a caldron of boiling oil! But the pursuing dog slips unhindered through the jungle, runs unmired through the mud, swims the pools of water, and stands howling underneath the tree where the fugitive has climbed to escape the canine’s tearing teeth. In half an hour the negroes, scratched, torn, snagged, wounded, bleeding, mud-covered, half-naked, looking more like wild beasts than men, stood on the banks of the Massacre Bayou. Forty yards behind them a pack of ravening dogs bayed a red-hot trail. “Swim it!” Mobile panted. “Git across dis creek, fer Gawd’s sake!” They leaped into the stream and dragged their exhausted bodies up the opposite bank just as the raging dogs stopped at the water’s edge on the bank they had just left. Mobile ran to a hickory sapling as large around as his arm. “He’p me break dis off, men,” he screamed. “We got to fight ’em!” With the strength of desperation, the three men wrenched at the sapling, snapped it off at the roots, broke it in a proper length for a club, and as quickly as possible selected and prepared two others like it. “Look out, niggers!” Mobile howled. “Dey’s gittin’ ready to swim across! Kill eve’y dog as quick as his front feet touches the land on dis side. Whatever happens, git dem big, black, long-eared debbils fust!”