The Boy With the U. S. Survey Part 5

It chanced one afternoon, right after the short stop in the middle of the day, that Field sent Roger off, to the right of the party, in quite dense timber, and told him not to go further than twenty-five yards away. For twenty or thirty feet the boy hacked manfully through the underbrush, and then, to his delight, came across a smooth piece of marsh overlaid with water. Testing carefully every step he took, the lad found the bottom of it less like a mora.s.s than was the general character of the swamp, and he knew enough to realize that there must be firm ground on the other side. Knowing, moreover, that a piece of information such as this would be of great a.s.sistance he ventured to cross the stretch, and as he surmised, found a small hog-back on the further sh.o.r.e of the shallow lake. This ran parallel, so far as he could judge, with the route being taken by the members of the party, and Roger conceived the idea of following along this line, until it would be time for him to rejoin his friends. The wood was thick on the ridge, however, and Roger found that he was not making good time, so after going half a mile or so, he decided to strike across and meet the rest of the party.

When Roger turned, however, he found that he had ceased to be opposite the slough, and he plunged into a dense and palpitating quagmire, the kind against which he had been specifically warned, fairly firm on the surface, but which quivered like a jelly as far as he could see when he stepped upon it. None the less, it was the only way the boy knew to rejoin his comrades, so with considerable trepidation he stepped upon the edge. It held him, though with a sort of "give" that was most unpleasant. Another step he took, and this time the quag seemed to resent his intrusion; large black bubbles formed slowly and broke a few inches before his foot and the ground seemed to heave in front of him.

The boy realized that he could go no further, but for daring and curiosity he took another step gingerly to see what would happen.

He learned! As the foot touched the ground it sank even with the little weight that he threw on it, almost to the depth of an inch, and with that slight pressure suddenly the suction of the marsh gripped him as though some foul fiend had him by the heel, and he threw all his weight back on his left foot in an endeavor to pull out the right. But this disturbed the balance of his poise, and the sudden weight on the one foot caused it to break through and the marsh had him by both feet. The pressure was so fearful that Roger knew shouting was useless, he would be deep under the quagmire before his comrades could even begin to find him.

But Field had not instructed Roger for nothing, and the lad was quick of thought. Instantly he threw his surveyor's rod down so that one end was on the comparatively dry ground whence he had stepped, the other by his feet, and with one supreme effort he threw himself flat upon the rod, though wrenching his ankle cruelly as he did so. This distribution of his weight over so much larger a plane surface prevented his further sinking, but the suction was still so great that he could not draw out his feet. Finally, by exerting all his strength he freed the one that was furthest out, and which had sunk but little, but he was held a prisoner by the other foot. Then an idea occurred to him. Taking his ax, he chopped the ground around his leg, and had the satisfaction of seeing water bubble up in its place. Little by little he loosened the suction of the bog until at last he was able to pull out his foot and crawl along the rod to the bank, where, trembling and exhausted, and suffering considerable pain from his wrenched ankle, he sat upon a projecting root to recover his breath and his somewhat shaken nerve.

This was Roger's first experience of the folly of attempting more than he had been told to do, before he was an old enough hand at the game to know the greatness of the risk. As soon as he had in part recovered himself, he shouted, according to agreement, expecting to hear immediately the return hail, which would tell him exactly where the party might be. But there was no answering cry! A little startled at the thought that he might have wandered out of hearing of the party, Roger waited a moment, then, making a megaphone of his hands, let out a stentorian howl, for all that he was worth. But the cry fell stifled in the dense branches and a m.u.f.fled echo was the only response. Thinking that perhaps a whistle would sound further, he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled long and shrill, a note loud enough, it seemed to him, to be heard for miles; but for all the token of human answer, it might have been the crying of the curlew above the marsh.

By this time Roger was fully alive to the difficulties that confronted him. If he were out of reach of the party, and could not make himself heard, it would be very difficult to trace them, even if he crossed their trail; unless it were where they had been making a sight or where undergrowth had been cut, there would be no mark of their pa.s.sage, as the soft ground speedily sucked in all trace of footsteps. A shot, he thought, would travel farther than the voice, and so, taking out his revolver, the boy fired three times in the air. He strained his ears eagerly, though fearing that no shot would answer, but when the minutes pa.s.sed by he knew that he was lost and that he would have to find his way back to the party unaided.

But one thing remained to be done. He must retrace his steps, trusting to his new-born knowledge of woodsmans.h.i.+p to lead him aright, back to the place where he had gained the ridge of ground from the shallow lake, then cross that, if he could remember the direction, and he would be but twenty yards or so from the path the party must have traveled. He would be a couple of hours behind them, of course, but if he could strike their trail he was bound to overtake them some time that night. There was no other alternative, he must endeavor to find them, even at the risk of becoming still more enmeshed in the mazes of the swamp.

Limping back over the ridge of ground, his ankle growing sorer each step, Roger painfully wended his way to the little lake. He found the ridge, but in returning it appeared to divide into twain paths, and for a moment his heart sank within him; as luck would have it, however, he remembered seeing a tree that had been struck by lightning somewhere about where he then was, and he determined to go along each of the paths until he struck the tree. Taking the left hand, at random, he hobbled along for half an hour, but seeing no blighted tree, retraced his way and took the other path. Just as he was about to give up that route also, in despair, the sentinel tree on which he had been building loomed up before him. It was the first sure sign that he was on the right trail, and Roger let out a boyish whoop of delight. Suddenly he thought he heard an answering yell, and he called again, but there being no answer he felt that his ears had deceived him. Soon he came to the banks of the little shallow lake, and struck in to wade across.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A TANGLE OF SWAMP.

Conditions which must be overcome by topographic parties, though "too wet for walking, too dense for boats."

_Photograph by U.S.G.S._]

It then became evident to the boy that he had entered the lake at a different point, for while it had been a little over his knees at the deepest part before, now it came to his thighs and was steadily deepening. In the middle the water was almost to his waist and the boy began to be alarmed concerning the contents of his pack, which he had stuck to throughout despite the pain in his foot. But while the water came to within six inches of the pack at one place, the bottom remained fairly hard, and presently it shallowed rapidly and Roger stood upon the farther sh.o.r.e.

This time, however, the luck which seemed to have deserted him so long, returned, for he found himself, in the course of a few steps, just at the place where the brushwood had been cut recently for the making of a sight, and the boy knew that he could not now be very far from the rest of the party. He followed the blazed trail as rapidly as his somewhat crippled condition would permit, shouting occasionally as he did so, when suddenly he heard voices. Stopping to make sure, and hearing speech quite distinctly, he hurried on, coming at last to a dense dark piece of the wood through which a path had been hewn with some difficulty.

Another two minutes, he was a.s.sured, would bring him among his comrades, when he heard the voices again, and what they said made him pause.

"It's a good one on the boy," said one of the voices.

Roger knew that he was always spoken of in camp as "the boy," and he thought if they were planning some practical joke on him, like the "snipe shoot," over which they had never ceased to tease him, there could be nothing wrong in listening so that he could checkmate it.

"He must be quite near us, now," replied the other.

"Almost as near," said the first speaker, "as he was when he first thought that he was lost. That was an awful howl he gave, the second one we heard. It would make a fair sample for an Atlantic liner's foghorn."

Both men laughed, and the rich, easy voice of the chief of the party broke in.

"I'm not sorry the boy got a scare," he said; "he's all right, is the boy, but he thinks he knows it all. They all do, at first. I told him not to go thirty yards away, and one way and another he must have gone a mile. It's a good thing he paralleled us, or somebody would have had to go after him."

"I thought sure he'd find us right away when David called back," said the first speaker.

"Yes," replied Field, "I thought so, too. But he didn't, you see. Now let him learn how hard it is to find a party in these swamps and he'll know better next time. You've got the location of his last call, haven't you?"

"Sure!" said one of the men.

"Oh-ho!" thought Roger to himself. "So that's the reason I got no answer to my shouting and my shots. They're just waiting until I get in to guy me some more." He sat down on a root and thought for a few minutes. Then he grinned, and decided to bear the pain in his ankle a few moments longer. Striking off sharply from the trail that had been cut, he wormed his way up and on until he was almost opposite the party, and directly to the left; then, holding a bunch of gra.s.s over his mouth to give the m.u.f.fled sound as of great distance, he gave a howl, putting into it as much anguish as he could manage.

As he expected he heard the sounds of work cease.

"The young idiot's wandered off the trail again," he heard David say to the chief.

"Well, get the direction," was the answer, with a tinge of annoyance this time, "and you two had better go after him. I made sure from his last hail that he was right by the camp."

Roger waggishly nodded his head in the direction of the speaker.

"I don't envy those two men their job," he said in an undertone, and, doubling on his tracks, he came back to the trail that had been blazed.

Then circling round to the right, so as to be in the opposite direction from that which his searchers had taken, he quietly made his way past the working force and came to the spot where the cook was just making preparations for dinner. Un.o.bserved, he crept quite close to the camp, and finding a convenient spruce with widely spreading branches, he climbed up some fifteen feet, where was a natural hammock in the boughs, and lay down, taking off the boot from his swollen foot and awaited what should come.

He had not long to wait. In less than half an hour the two men returned stating that they had found some signs of ax-work in the vicinity of the last hail, but that they had called and called and received no reply.

The men spoke gravely and one of them said:

"I hope the youngster has not struck a quag!"

The leader gave an impatient exclamation.

"Well," he said, "it's our own fault if we have any trouble finding him, but he has been within a hundred yards of the camp all this time that he has been making such a fuss, and how he could be such an a.s.s as to cross our trail and get on the other side of it without noticing, gets me."

Roger chuckled.

"You'll find it harder hunting for me than I did for you," he said to himself, "and perhaps the laugh won't be all on the one side."

He settled himself more comfortably in the tree and listened to Field giving instructions to the members of the party how they should separate and circle at an appointed distance, calling every few minutes as they did so.

In less than a quarter of an hour the camp was vacant except for the cook, who was still busy preparing the evening meal. That was the only part that was hard to Roger, for he had been through a good deal of excitement since lunch and not only was tired, but also very hungry. His foot was not hurting so much now that he was not stepping on it and with his boot off, although it had puffed up rapidly after the removal of the boot. But to be up in the branches of a tree, as hungry as a wolf, and to see the grub below, was almost more than boy nature could stand.

Presently the cook, having laid out a loaf of bread and a knuckle of ham, picked up his ax and went into the brush to get a little more dry wood, which was somewhat scarce about the camp. Roger slipped down from the tree and seized the bread and ham. Then in order that it might not be suspected who had done it, he scrabbled on the tin plate with some mud, and in the stiffer soil about--for that was the reason it had been chosen for a camp,--he made some tracks with the first, second, and third knuckles of his hand and the mark of his thumb knuckle behind. At a little distance the track looked almost like fox tracks. By stepping carefully on tufts of gra.s.s he kept the marks of his own feet from being seen, and then, with his booty, he returned to the tree.

He was hardly more than safely ensconced among the branches when the cook returned. He busied himself about the fire with the wood that he had brought, then chancing to look at the dish, he saw that the hambone and the bread had gone. The cook, whose language was that of a woodsman, consigned all four-footed thieves to perdition, and then bent down to examine the tracks. He looked at them carefully several times over, then:

"I sure would like to see that beast critter," he said, "fer that's the most plumb foolish tracks I ever set eyes on. It must be fox--but there ain't no foxes in this kind o' country, and, anyhow, the tracks don't mate."

This was true, for Roger had made the tracks, both on the nigh and the off sides with the fingers of his right hand. The cook, after muttering and grumbling to himself, got out from his store of provisions enough for the meal, and proceeded to cook the same, not without many returns to the mysterious tracks and comments more or less audible on creatures with feet like that who were so apt at thieving.

Presently two of the party came in, shaking their heads negatively to the cook's questioning gesture.

"Nary a sign," said one of the men, "he's lost a good and plenty."

"I ain't got much time to help," said the cook, "though I'll go out with you after supper. But this spot has got me locoed."

"How's that?" asked one.

The cook pointed to the tracks.

"I used to think I knew quite some about the swamps," he said, "I was born with an ax in my hand, pretty near, but I never yet saw any critter with tracks like them. An' what's more, I ain't never been informed that ham sandwiches form a reg'lar part of a fox's menoo!"

One of the men bent to examine the tracks, but the other said airily: