s, "I see him!"

"Who do you see?" demanded Tad, who was turning around and trying to
look all ways at once.

"There! Can't you see him?" demanded Rose, with growing excitement. "Oh,
the poor thing!"

Just then an unmistakable "bla-a-at!" startled the other children--even
Tad Munson. He brought his gaze down from the trees into the branches of
which he had been staring.

"Bla-a-at!" was the repeated cry, which at first the children had
thought had been "Help!"

"And sure enough," Russ said confidently, "he is saying 'help!' just as
near as he can say it."

"The poor thing!" sighed Rose again.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT WAS STUCK IN THE MUD

Russ began to whistle a tune, as he often did when he was puzzled. It
was not that he was puzzled about the thing he saw--and which Rose had
seen first--but at once Russ felt that he must discover a way to get the
blatting object out of the mud.

"What do you know about that!" cried Tad Munson. "That's John Winsome's
red calf. See! He's sunk clear to his backbone in the mud."

"Oh, dear me!" cried Rose. "The poor thing!"

She had said that twice before, but everybody was so excited that none
of them noticed that Rose was repeating herself. In fact, both Vi and
Margy said the very same thing, and in chorus:

"Oh, the poor thing!"

"Is that a red calf, Tad Munson?" asked Laddie. "For if it is, it's a
riddle. Its head and its neck and its tail are all splattered with mud."

"It was a red calf when it went into the swamp, all right," said Tad
with confidence. "I know that calf, all right. And John Winsome told me
only this morning that he had lost it."

"Who put it in that horrid swamp?" Vi demanded.

"I guess it just wandered in," said Tad.

"And it is sinking down right now," Russ tried. "See it?"

Indeed the poor calf--a well grown animal--was in a very serious plight.
It was eight or ten feet from the edge of the road where the logs were.
And the calf had evidently struggled a good deal and was now quite
exhausted. It turned its head to look at the children and blatted again.

"Oh, dear!" said Margy, almost in tears, "it is asking us to help it
just as plain as it can."

"I'm going to run and tell John Winsome--right now I am!" shouted Tad,
and he turned around and ran back along the road they had come just as
fast as he could run.

But Russ stayed where he was. His lips were still puckered in a whistle
and he was thinking hard.

"What can we do for the