“I’ve a notion there must be a tree trunk hereaway; it ain’t the first time I’ve followed this track.  There it is, but a good six foot off.”  And so saying, he gave a spring, and alighted in safety on the stepping place.

“Have a care, man,” cried I.  “There is water there.  I see it glitter.”

“Pho, water!  What you call water is snakes.  Come on.”

I hesitated, and a shudder came over me.  The leap, as regarded distance, was a trifling one, but it was over an almost bottomless chasm, full of the foulest mud, on which the mocassin snakes, the deadliest of the American reptiles, were swarming.

“Come on!”

Necessity lent me strength, and, pressing my left foot firmly against the log on which I was standing, and which was each moment sinking with our weight deeper into the soft slimy ground, I sprang across.  Carleton followed me.

“Well done!” cried the old man.  “Courage, and a couple more such leaps, and we shall be getting over the worst of it.”

We pushed on, steadily but slowly, never setting our foot on a log till we had ascertained its solidity with the butts of our guns.  The cypress swamp extended four or five miles along the shores of the creek:  it was a deep lake of black mud, covered over and disguised by a deceitful bright green veil of creeping plants and mosses, which had spread themselves in their rank luxuriance over its whole surface, and over the branches and trunks of trees scattered about the swamp.  These latter were not placed with any very great regularity, but had yet been evidently arranged by the hand of man.

“There seems to have been a sort of path made here,” said I to our guide, “for”——­

“Silence!” interrupted he, in a low tone; “silence, for your life, till we are on firm ground again.  Don’t mind the snakes,” added he, as the torchlight revealed some enormous ones lying coiled up on the moss and lianas close to us.  “Follow me closely.”

But just as I stretched forward my foot, and was about to place it in the very print that his had left, the hideous jaw of an alligator was suddenly stretched over the tree-trunk, not six inches from my leg, and the creature snapped at me so suddenly, that I had but just time to fire my gun into his glittering lizard-like eye.  The monster bounded back, uttered a sound between a bellow and a groan, and, striking wildly about him in the morass, disappeared.

The American looked round when I fired, and an approving smile played about his mouth as he said something to me which I did not hear, owing to the infernal uproar that now arose on all sides of us and at first completely deafened me.