There is a limit, however, to human endurance, even where liberty is at stake.  We trod air one time, in that disconcerting way which jarred one more than many a mile of travel, and landed heavily in the slime below, and Le Marchant lay and made no attempt to rise.  I groped till I found him, and hauled him to solider ground, and he lay there coughing and choking, and at last sobbing angrily, not with weakness of soul but from sheer lack of strength to move.

“Go on!  Go on!” he gasped, as soon as he could speak.  “I’m done.  Get you along!”

“I’m done too,” I said, and in truth I could not have gone much farther.  “We’ll rest here till daybreak, then we can see where we are.”

He had no breath for argument, and we lay in the muddy sedge till our hearts had settled to a more reasonable beat, and we had breath for speech.

“How far have we come, do you think?” Le Marchant asked.

“It felt like fifty miles, but it was such rough work that it’s probably nearer five.  But it can’t be long to daylight.  Then we shall know better.”

We struggled to a drier hummock and lay down again.  The rain had ceased, and presently, while we lay watching for the first flicker of dawn in front or on our left, an exclamation from Le Marchant brought me round with a jerk, to find the sky softening and lightening right behind us.  The ditches and the darkness and our many falls had led us astray.  Instead of going due east we had fetched a compass and bent round to the north; instead of leaving our prison we had circled round it.  And as the shadows lightened on the long dim flats, we saw in the distance the black ring of the stockade on its little elevation.

“Let us get on,” said Le Marchant, with a groan at the wasted energies of the night.

“I believe we’re safer here.  If they seek us it will be farther away.  They’d never think we’d be such fools as to stop within a couple of miles of the prison.”

And, indeed, before I had done speaking, we could make out the tiny black figures of patrols setting off along the various roads that led through the swamps, and so we lay still, and watched the black figures disappear to the east and south and north.

So long as we kept hidden I had no great fear of them, for the swamps were honeycombed with hiding-places, and to beat them thoroughly would have required one hundred men to every one they could spare.

“I’m not at all sure it’s us they’re after,” I said, by way of cheer for us both.  “All that turmoil last night and the fire makes me think some of the others in Number Three were on the same job.”

“Like enough, but I don’t see that it helps us much.  Can we find anything to eat?”

But we had come away too hurriedly to make any provision, and we knew too little of the roots among which we lay to venture any of them.  So we lay, hungry and sodden, in spite of the sun which presently set the flats steaming, and did not dare to move lest some sharp eye should spy us.  We could only hope for night and stars, and then sooner or later to come across some place where food could be got, if it was only green grain out of a field, for our stomachs were calling uneasily.