The stream was hardly more than a rivulet, a few feet wide, but it offered him his only chance to cover his scent. Plunging in, he found it less than knee-deep, with a fairly smooth, sandy bottom. He followed it downstream, wading fast, and keeping an eye on the direction it was taking, when the leaves overhead permitted a view of the stars. Once or twice he had to climb out to get around fallen trees, and this gave him an idea. Wherever there was a likely opening on either bank, leading away from the stream, he left the water, ran a few steps into the woods and returned, as nearly as possible in the same tracks. Then he waded on with all the speed he could muster. Occasionally the wind bore to him the cry of the hound, sometimes clearer, sometimes fainter, but always a sound that chilled his blood. Tad had long since passed the winded stage. He went on steadily, his breathing a succession of gasps that no longer seemed to hurt, a deadness in his legs and a queer ringing in his ears. He had no idea how long he had been running so, when suddenly the brook deepened and his numbed senses were shocked wide awake by a plunge into cold water. He realized, as he floundered up again, that the sky overhead was open. He was standing up to his neck in a broad marshy pool that stretched away to left and right for a long distance. Under the ghostly moon it lay dark and mysterious, wholly silent except for the muffled plash of a heron hunting frogs. Like every boy, Tad had a horror of swimming in strange water at night. He stood there, shivering, trying to make up his mind. The opposite bank was not so far away, but sluggish ponds ... water moccasins.... The bay of the bloodhound came to him again, unexpectedly close this time. He waited no longer but threw himself forward, swimming with all his might. The pool was only thirty or forty yards across at this place, and in a few strokes he was halfway over. Then a vicious cramp caught at the big muscles in the back of his thigh--twisting him with pain till he almost went under. He managed to straighten the leg and struggled on, kicking only with the other, till he felt ooze under his toes, and crawled out somehow through slimy reeds and lily-pads to the soft black earth of the bank. There for a while he lay, his exhaustion so complete that he scarcely cared what happened. Both his legs were cruelly knotted with cramps, and his whole body ached with weariness. Rest he must have if he were ever to reach the river. He crept a little farther into the reeds and lay on his back, staring up at the stars and listening to the intermittent baying of the hound. At last the cramps left him and he thought he had recovered his wind sufficiently to go on. But just as he was rising to his knees there came a thrashing in the underbrush near the mouth of the brook and he heard men’s voices. A light breeze was blowing across the pond from them to him so that he caught some of the words plainly.