We told him three or four miles, and that the motor-boat could get through to the river that way, because this slough was not dammed at the head. “Speed up, Wampus,” Jibby said. “We will get out into the river, and hasten back down below the mouth of the slough, and below the swamp. Can we walk back to the hills below the swamp?” We all thought so, although we had never tried it, so we ran on up the slough and out into the river, and chugged back to where the swamp below the slough ended. We left the motor-boat there and struck inland. It was a tough trip. First, we had to climb five or six feet of steep mud bank, and that brought us to a thicket of willows and weeds and trees and grapevines that we had to fight through inch by inch, pushing them aside and climbing over and dodging under. Then this opened onto a blind slough--a slough that closed at both ends when the river fell in the spring--and we had to work down-river a half-mile or so until we came to a place where there was no water and the surface of the mud had dried and cracked into big bent cakes. We crossed there and fought through more thicket and came out into a forest of water-maples and water-elms. The river had been over this in the spring, and there was half a mile or so of stinging nettles, shoulder high, and great rifts of driftwood. We couldn’t walk in a straight direction more than twenty feet at a time; we had to go around piles of driftwood, or around mud holes, or pools, or places where the ground was like mush. Forty times we went in over the tops of our shoes, but by and by we came to a huge big cornfield that had been planted after the water had fallen. We walked between the rows of corn, and as we went the land got higher and higher until it began to slant up fairly steep, and then the cornfield ended and we were at the foot of the hills. The hills here rounded upward and were grassy and not very bad walking, and we got to the top. We were just back of a farmhouse, and we edged along the farm fence, up-river toward the Greenland crossroad, and then struck inland until we hit the hilltop road. We walked along that until we came to the Greenland store. Right away we saw that the map did not exactly jibe with the things we saw. In the first place, the store was not as far back from the crossroad as the map showed it to be; it was so close to the crossroad that you could step off the porch into the road. And there was no signal pine there, because there was no room for one. We sat down by the side of the road to have a look at the map. Jibby left us there looking at the map while he walked down the crossroad. In a couple of minutes he came back.