Illustration #2

“A map”

As long as there’s any sign of a trail you can’t get me rattled, but cracky, I don’t like marshes.  You can get lost in a marsh easier than in any other place.  Pretty soon I was plodding around deeper than my knees and it gave me a strain every time I dragged my leg out of the swamp.  Maybe you’ll wonder why I didn’t go back, but if you do, that’s because you don’t know much about marshes.  All of a sudden I was right in the middle of it, as you might say, and there were no landmarks at all.

Pretty soon I was in waist deep and then I was scared, you can bet.  If there’s one thing that gets me scared it’s quicksand.  As long as I could get my legs out I was all right, but when I began sinking as low as my waist and had to drag myself out by squirming and catching hold of bushes and things, then I lost my nerve—­I have to admit it.

I saw I was a fool ever to go into that pesky place, but it was too late and I knew that pretty soon I’d be in too deep to get out.  Oh, jiminies, I was scared.  Once, after I scrambled out I tried lying flat on the marsh with the reeds laid over sideways underneath me.  But they didn’t hold me up and anyway I knew I couldn’t lie that way forever.  I wondered how a scout had ever gone through here.

Before I knew how to swim I came mighty near to getting drowned and I got lost in the woods, too, when I was a tenderfoot.  But this was worse than anything I ever knew before.  Once I sank down almost to my shoulders and I guess I would have been a goner, only my feet struck something hard and flat and I stood on that until I got rested a little.

All the while I looked around to see if I could decide where the land might be a little harder, but I guess I must have been in the worst part of it.  I decided that the safest thing I could do was to stand just where I was.  I didn’t know what it was I was standing on, but anyway it didn’t seem to sink any, so I was kind of safe there, as you might say.  But I knew I could never raise myself out of that place and I’d have to just stand there till I got so tired and hungry, that I’d drop down and be sucked into the marsh.

So anyway, I’d have to die, I was sure of that only I didn’t want to die any sooner than I had to.  Two or three times I shouted as loud as I could, but I knew it wasn’t any use, because I was two or three miles away from any house.  Even if anybody knew, I didn’t see how they could get to me and it was only by good luck that I wasn’t dead already on account of the hard thing I was standing on.  Every once in a while bubbles would come up and I thought it was because that thing I was standing on was sinking lower.  The marsh was just about even with my shoulders and I kept looking sideways at my shoulders all the time, so as to see if I was going down any and sometimes I thought I was.  But I guess I wasn’t.