As the afternoon waned, the mosquitoes were bad enough. But Nat’s little sister, Edith, had beheld our “making-up” from afar, and about the time we entered the Dismal Swamp, she reached our mothers and told her story. Two highly exasperated, grim-lipped women ultimately joined the “bloodhounds” and outdid them. For our mothers found us and the dogs did not. Splashed with mud and slime on top of our coating of axle grease, scratched by brambles and bruised by limbs of dead trees which protruded from the most unexpected places, the slaves in the dismal swamp finally found a soft spot to sit down and weep with a great lamentation. We had a disturbing hunch from our experience in the bog water that our Ethiopian camouflage was not going to be removed with any such dexterity as the Mayo boy had assured us so glibly. The posse finally surrounded us. There was no escaping through that cordon. Our mothers’ skirts were bedraggled. Their shoes squeegeed water at every step. But they bagged us. And the expression on their faces when they held us at arm’s length was sickening. Somehow we felt that again the Mayo boy had “spoofed” us. The Mayo boy was not among those present when we were taken into custody, by the way. “We’re slaves in a Dismal Swamp,” explained Nathan, when his mother had firmly entwined her fingers around a slippery ear. “Well, in mighty short order you’re going to be two sorrowful boys in a darned dismal wash-dish!” prophesied that wrathful lady. And she looked at my mother, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. “Anna,” gasped my horrified mother, “—suppose—suppose—it won’t wash off!” “Then I’ll set fire to my young one and burn it off!” avowed Mrs. Forge grimly. Whereupon Nathan began caterwauling and his asseverations that he didn’t mean to do it became as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Through the ups and downs of thirty years I have made many strange journeys over many rough pathways. Not one of them has equaled the awfulness of traversing those two miles of oozy bog that summer afternoon, dragged wrathfully by a grim woman whose concentration was glued on the impending ordeal of separating me from that unspeakable coating of slime and grease. “When I catch that Mayo young one,” announced my mother, “I’ll skin him alive!” “Amen!” affirmed Anna Forge. She gave Nathan a yank that pulled him over a boghole as though he were greased. Which he was. Greased thoroughly, adequately, irrevocably. We got as far as the Forge homestead, and my mother decided to stop there and cleanse her offspring in company with her neighbor, rather to lighten the labor—to say nothing of the color of her boy—by sharing it.