t
it was summer. In such a situation with winter on top of it only the
hardiest of men could survive.

But they entered the swamp, Carpenter silent and dogged, still leading.
Henry and his comrades kept close to the crowd. One could not scout in
such a morass, and it proved to be worse than they had feared. The day
turned gray, and it was dark among the trees. The whole place was filled
with gloomy shadows. It was often impossible to judge whether fairly
solid soil or oozy murk lay before them. Often they went down to their
waists. Sometimes the children fell and were dragged up again by the
stronger. Now and then rattle snakes coiled and hissed, and the women
killed them with sticks. Other serpents slipped away in the slime.
Everybody was plastered with mud, and they became mere images of human
beings.

In the afternoon they reached a sort of oasis in the terrible swamp,
and there they buried two more of their number who had perished from
exhaustion. The rest, save a few, lay upon the ground as if dead. On all
sides of them stretched the pines and the soft black earth. It looked to
the fugitives like a region into which no human beings had ever come,
or ever would come again, and, alas! to most of them like a region from
which no human being would ever emerge.

Henry sat upon a piece of fallen brushwood near the edge of the morass,
and looked at the fugitives, and his heart sank within him. They were
hardly in the likeness of his own kind, and they seemed practically
lifeless now. Everything was dull, heavy, and dead. The note of the wind
among the leaves was somber. A long black snake slipped from the marshy
grass near his feet and disappeared soundlessly in the water. He was
sick, sick to death at the sight of so much suffering, and the desire
for vengeance, slow, cold, and far more lasting than any hot outburst,
grew within him. A slight noise, and Shif'less Sol stood beside him.

"Did you hear?" asked the shiftless one, in a significant tone.

"Hear what?" asked Henry, who had been deep in thought.

"The wolf howl, just a very little cry, very far away an' under the
horizon, but thar all the same. Listen, thar she goes ag'in!"

Henry bent his ear and distinctly heard the faint, whining note, and
then it came a third time.

He looked tip at Shif'less Sol, and his face grew white--but not for
himself.

"Yes," said Shif'less Sol. He understood the look. "We are pursued. Them
wolves howlin' are the Iroquois.