And following them, ever coming nearer and nearer, was the dog. His baying had never ceased. They could see him, now plunging along, clawing at the mangrove roots to regain his footing, pulling himself up by desperate efforts, baying with the weird, nerve-racking regularity of his kind, his livid mouth hanging open, eyes gleaming from the strain of his endeavors to keep himself alive and overtake the children. Would he leap at them and jerk them down from their present security into the very mouths of these appalling reptiles? Mollie didn't think so. "Never yo' min' Tige," called Mollie, still speaking with difficulty through teeth that continued to chatter like castanets. "He ain't so mean's Pete thunk he war. He'll git chawed up, shore es sartin, ef he lan's on ary o' them thing's." She lifted up her voice then and shouted back to the plunging dog that she had pitied from the day Peter had kicked him into unconsciousness for some trivial thing. "Go back, Tige. Go hum--go hum!" But Tige had no thought now of turning back. He knew his best friend was up in that tree and he came on, unable to sense that his formidable appearance belied his kind intentions and only increased the terror of the little ones whose prattling voices he had loved to hear as he lay, day after day, in his gloomy prison house. He only knew that he was free at last and that he was coming to them as fast as he could. Poor Tige! He reached the foot of the tree, hesitated, gave one startled, guttural sniff mingled with a growl of fear, caught one glimpse of the dragon-like monster under the tree, then dropped his tail and bounded back, faster and faster, in the direction from whence he had come. Whether or not he ever succeeded in re-crossing the death-gripping bog at the farm entrance Mollie never knew. She could not think of Tige. Her struggle, at that moment, was for the string of little, human sparrows, lined out on that limb behind her. Her nerves had arrived at so sensitive a state that even the rustling of a leaf was enough to startle her, but the sound which now crept to her ears was far more ominous than the mere falling of a bit of foliage. It was accompanied by an almost imperceptible jar. Again it came. Mollie's blood ran cold. She gave one quick glance in the direction of the sound then another down at the swirling welter of what she had now decided were "water-hawgs" almost directly under the limb upon which they were perched. If that limb broke and the children fell, nothing on earth could save them!