The pony squirmed, heaved, wrestled in a frenzy, and churning the red water about his master’s thighs, went deeper and fared worse.  With a clangor of wings, the storks rose, a streaming rout against the sky, trailed their tilted legs, filed away in straggling flight, like figures interlacing on a panel.  At the height of his distress, Rudolph caught a whirling glimpse of the woman above him, safe on firm earth, easy in her saddle, and laughing.  Quicksand, then, was a joke,—­but he could not pause for this added bewilderment.

The pony, using a skill born of agony, had found somewhere a solid verge and scrambled up, knee-deep, well out from the bank.  With a splash, Rudolph stood beside him among the tufts of salad green.  As he patted the trembling flanks, he heard a cry from the shore.

“Oh, well done!” she mocked them.  “Well done!”

A gust of wholesome anger refreshed him.  She might laugh, but now he would see this folly through.  He tore off his coat, flung it across the saddle, waded out alone through the tussocks, and shooting forward full length in the turbid water, swam resolutely for the island.

Sky and water brightened while he swam; and as he rose, wrapped in the leaden weight of dripping clothes, the sun, before and above him, touched wonderfully the quaggy bank and parched grasses.  He lurched ashore, his feet caked with enormous clods as of melting chocolate.  A filthy scramble left him smeared and disheveled on the summit.  He had come for nothing.  The mound lay vacant, a tangled patch, a fragment of wilderness.

Yet as he stood panting, there rose a puny, miserable sound.  What presence could lurk there?  The distress, it might be, of some small animal—­a rabbit dying in a forgotten trap.  Faint as illusion, a wail, a thin-spun thread of sorrow, broke into lonely whimpering, and ceased.  He moved forward, doubtfully, and of a sudden, in the scrubby level of the isle, stumbled on the rim of a shallow circular depression.

At first, he could not believe the discovery; but next instant—­as at the temple pond, though now without need of placard or interpreter—­he understood.  This bowl, a tiny crater among the weeds, showed like some paltry valley of Ezekiel, a charnel place of Herod’s innocents, the battlefield of some babes’ crusade.  A chill struck him, not from the water or the early mists.  In stupor, he viewed that savage fact.

Through the stillness of death sounded again the note of living discontent.  He was aware also of some stir, even before he spied, under a withered clump, the saffron body of an infant girl, feebly squirming.  By a loathsome irony, there lay beside her an earthen bowl of rice, as an earnest or symbol of regret.

Blind pity urged him into the atrocious hollow.  Seeing no further than the present rescue, he caught up the small unclean sufferer, who moaned the louder as he carried her down the bank, and waded out through the sludge.  To hold the squalling mouth above water, and swim, was no simple feat; yet at last he came floundering among the tussocks, wrapped the naked body in his jacket, and with infinite pains tugged his terrified pony along a tortuous bar to the land.