Part 6

"Oh, I can do that!" said Herring. "You begin with the big piece and you stick the next-sized piece into that, and so on. And I know how to put the reel on, because the man in the store showed me, and I know how to run the line through the rings."

"Well," said Phyllis, "that's more than half the battle."

"And," Herring continued, "he showed me how to tie on the what-you-may-call-it and the flies."

"Good!" said Phyllis.

"And, of course," he concluded, "I've forgotten."

Now, Phyllis had been shown how to tie flies to a leader only the night before, and she, also, had forgotten.

"There are," she said, "a great many fetiches among anglers. Among them are knots. Now, in my experience, almost any knot that will stand will do. The important thing is to choose the right flies."

As to this, she had also received instruction, but with better results, since it was an entirely feminine affair of colored silks and feathers.

"I will tell you which flies to use," she said.

"And," said he, "you will also have to show me how to cast."

"What!" she exclaimed, and stopped rowing, "You don't know how to cast?"

"No," he said, "I don't. I'm a dub. Didn't you know that?"

"But," she protested, "I can't teach you in a morning"--and she added mentally--"or in a whole lifetime, for that matter."

It was not more than a mile across the mouth of a deep bay to the brook in which they had elected to fish. With no wind to object, the most dabbily propelled guide boat travels with considerable speed, and before Herring had managed to tie the flies which Phyllis had selected to his leader (with any kind of a knot) they were among the snaggy shallows of the brook's mouth.

The brook was known locally as Swamp Brook, its shores for a mile or more being boggy and treacherous. Fishermen who liked to land occasionally and cast from terra firma avoided it. Phyllis had selected it solely because it was the nearest brook to the camp which contained trout. If she had remembered how full it was of snags, and how easily guide boats are turned turtle, she would have selected some other brook, even, if necessary, at the "Back of beyond." It had been easy enough to propel the boat across the open waters of the lake, but to guide it clear of snags and around right-angle bends, especially when the genius of rowing demands that eyes look astern rather than ahead, was beyond her powers. The boat ran into snags, poked its nose into boggy banks, turned half over, righted, rushed on, and stopped again with rude bumps.

Herring, that fatalistic young Bostonian, began to take an interest in his fate. His flies trailed in the water behind him. His eyes never left Phyllis's face. His handsome mouth was as near to smiling as it ever got.

"Do you," he said presently, "swim as well as you row?"

She stopped rowing; she laughed right out.

"Just about," she said.

"Good," he said seriously, "because I'm a dub at it, and in case of an upset, I look to you."

"The truth," said Phyllis, "is that there's no place to swim to. It's all swamp in here."

"True," said Herring; "we would have to cling to the boat and call upon Heaven to aid us."

One of Herring's flies, trailing in the water, proved, at this moment, overwhelmingly attractive to a young and unsophisticated trout.

Herring shouted with the triumph of a schoolboy, "I've got one," and sprang to his feet.

"Please sit down!" said Phyllis. "We almost went that time."

"So we did," said Herring.

He sat down, and they almost "went" again.

"Now," said Phyllis, "play him."

"Play him?" said Herring. "Watch me." And he began to pull strongly upon the fish.

The fish was young and weak. Herring's tackle was new and strong. The fish dangled in mid-air over the middle of the boat.

"Sorry," said Herring, "I can't reach him. Take him off, please."

It has been said that Phyllis was a good sport. If there was one thing she hated and feared more than another, it was a live fish. She reached forward; her gloved hand almost closed upon it; it gave a convulsive flop; Phyllis squeaked like a mouse, threw her weight to one side, and the boat quietly upset.

The sportsmen came to the surface streaming.

"I can touch bottom," said Herring politely; "can you?"

"Yes," she said, "but my feet are sinking into it--" She tore them loose and swam. Herring did likewise. And they clung to the boat.

"I hope you'll forgive me," said Phyllis. "I never rowed a boat before and I never could stand live fish."

"It was my fault," said Herring. "Something told me to lean the opposite from the way you leaned. But it told me too late. The truth is I don't know how to behave in a boat. Well, you are still guide. It's up to you."

"What is up to me?"

"A plan of some sort," said he, "to get us out of this."

"Oh, no," she said, "it's up to you."

"My plan," he said, "would be to get back into the boat and row home. It seems feasible, and even easy. But appearances are deceptive. I think I'd rather walk. What has happened here might happen out on the middle of the lake."

"What you don't realize," said Phyllis, "is that we're in the midst of an impassable swamp."

"Impassable?"

"Well, no one's ever crossed it except in winter."

"What--no one!"

He was immensely interested.

"Do you know," he went on confidentially, "the only things that I'm good at are things for which there are no precedents--things that nobody has ever done before. That's why I'm so fond of doing unusual things. Now, you say that this swamp has never been crossed? Enough said. You and I will cross it. We _will_ do it. Are you game?"

"It seems," said Phyllis, "merely a question of when and where we drown. So I'm game. Your teeth are chattering."

"Thank you," said Herring. "But no harm will come to them. They are very strong."

"I hope," said Phyllis, "that when I come out of the water you won't look at me. I shall be a sight."

"A comrade in trouble," said Herring, "is never a sight."

"I am so ashamed," said Phyllis.

"What of?"

"Of being such a fool."

"You're a good sport," said Herring. "That's what you are."

By dint of violent kicking and paddling with their free hands they managed to propel the guide boat from the centre of the brook to a firm-looking clump of reeds and alder roots which formed a tiny peninsula from that shore which was toward The Camp. Covered with slime and mud they dragged themselves out of the water and stood balancing upon the alder roots to recover their breath.

"We must each take an oar," said Herring. "We can make little bridges with them. And we must keep working hard so as to get warm. We shall live to write a brochure about this: 'From Clump to Clump, or Mudfoots in the Adirondacks.'"

Between that clump on which they had found a footing and the next was ten feet of water.

Herring crossed seven feet of it with one heavy jump, fell on his face, caught two handfuls of viburnum stems, and once more dragged himself out of water.

"Now then," he called, "float the oars over to me." And when Phyllis had done this: "Now you come. The main thing in crossing swamps is to keep flat instead of up and down. Jump for it--fall forward--and I'll get your hands!"

Once more they stood side by side precariously balancing.

"The moment," said Herring, "that you begin to feel bored, tell me."

"Why?"

"So that I can encourage you. I will tell you that you are doing something that has never been done before. And that will make you feel fine and dandy. What we are doing is just as hard as finding the North Pole, only there isn't going to be so much of it. Now then, in negotiating this next sheet of water----"

And so they proceeded until the sun was high in the heavens and until it was low.

XIV

To attempt the dangerous passage of a swamp when they might have returned to camp in the guide boat was undoubtedly a most imbecile decision. And if Phyllis had not been thoroughly flustered by the upset, which was all her fault, she never would have consented to it. As for Herring's voice in the matter, it was that which the young man always gave when there was a question of adventure. He didn't get around mountains by the valley road. He climbed over them. He had not in his whole being a suspicion of what is dangerous. He had never been afraid of anything. He probably never would be. He would have enjoyed leading half a dozen forlorn hopes every morning before breakfast.

"We were idiots," said Phyllis, "to leave the boat."

"We can't go back to it now," said Herring. "We don't know the way."

"Your voice sounds as if you were glad of it."

"I am. I was dreadfully afraid you'd decide against crossing this swamp. I'd set my heart on it."

"It isn't I," said Phyllis, "that's against our crossing this swamp. It's the swamp."

"The main thing," said Herring, with satisfaction (physically he was almost exhausted), "is that here we are safe and sound. We don't know where 'here' is, but it's with us, it won't run away. When we've rested we shall go on, taking 'here' with us. Wherever we go is 'here.' Think of that!"

"I wish I could think of something else," said Phyllis, "but I can't. I'm almost dead."

"You are doing something that no girl has ever done before, not even your sisters, those princesses of fortune. Years from now, when you begin, 'Once when I happened to be crossing the Swamp with a young fellow named Herring--' they will have to sit silent and listen."

"If you weren't so cheerful," said Phyllis, "I should have begun to cry an hour ago. Do you really think this is fun?"

"Do I think it's fun? To be in a scrape--not to know when or how we are going to get out of it? You bet I think it's fun."

"People have died," said Phyllis, "having just this sort of fun. Suppose we can't get out?"

"You mean to-day? Perhaps we can't. Perhaps not to-morrow. Perhaps we shall have to learn how to live in a swamp. A month of the life we've led for the last few hours might turn us into amphibians. That would be intensely novel and interesting. But, of course, when winter comes and the place freezes over we can march right out and take up our orthodox lives where we left off. Listen!"

"What?"

"I think I hear webs growing between my fingers and toes."

Phyllis laughed so that the partially dried mud on her face cracked.

"What," she said, "are we going to eat this side of winter? What are we going to eat now?"

His face expressed immense concern.

"What? You are hungry? Allow me!"

He produced from his inside pocket a very large cake of sweet chocolate, wrapped in several thicknesses of oiled silk.

"My one contribution," he said, "to the science of woodcraft."

Phyllis ate and was refreshed. Afterward she washed all the mud from her face. Herring watched the progress of the ablution with much interest.

"Wonderful!" he said presently.

"What is wonderful?" she asked, not without anticipation of a compliment.

"Wonderful to find that something which is generally accepted as true--is true. To see it proved before your eyes."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, "that I never before actually saw a girl wash her face. I've seen 'em when they said they were going to. I've seen 'em when they said they just had. But now I know."

"If you weren't quite mad," said Phyllis, "you'd be very exasperating. Here am I, frightened half to death, cold and miserable, and dreadfully worried to think how worried my family must be, and there are you, almost too tired to stand, actually delighted with yourself, because you're in trouble and because for the first time in your life you've seen a girl wash her face. Can't you be serious about anything?"

"Not about a half-drowned girl taking the trouble to wash her face," he said.

"You," said she, "would look much better if you washed yours."

"But," he said, "we'll be covered with mud again before we've gone fifty yards."

"Because you are going into a coal mine to-morrow," said Phyllis, "is no reason why you shouldn't be clean to-day."

"True," said Herring, and he washed his face.

* * * * *

At breakfast that morning Pritchard received the following cablegram:

Come home and shake hands. I'm off. M.

Greatly moved, he carried it to Gay, and without comment put it in her hand.

"Who is M?" she asked.

"My uncle, the Earl of Merrivale."

"What does _I'm off_ mean?"

"It means," said Pritchard, "that they've given him up, and he wants to make friends. He never liked my father or me."

"It means," said Gay generously, "that you are going away?"

"Yes," he said, "at once. But it means more. It means that I've got to find out if I'm--to come back some time?"

"Of course, you are to come back," she said.

Words rose swiftly to Pritchard's lips and came no further. Indeed, he appeared to swallow them.

"And I'm glad you are going to make friends with your uncle," said Gay.

"There'll be such lots of young men here when the season opens," said Pritchard.

"Judging by applications," said Gay, "we shall be swamped with gentlemen of all ages."

Pritchard's melancholy only deepened. "Will you come as far as Carrytown in the _Streak_?" he asked.

She nodded, and said she would because she had some shopping to do.

During that short, exhilarating rush across the lake, and afterward walking up and down on the board platform by the side of the waiting train, he tried his best to ring a little sentiment out of her, but failed utterly.

The locomotive whistled, and the conductor came out of the village drug-store, staggering slightly.

"I've left all my dry-fly tackle," said Pritchard. "Will _you_ take care of it for me?"

"With pleasure," said Gay.

"I'd like you to use it. It's a lovely rod to throw line."

"All aboard!"

"I'd like to bring you out some rods and things. May I?"

"You bet you may!" exclaimed Gay.

Pritchard sighed. The train creaked, jolted, moved forward, stopped, jerked, and moved forward again. Pritchard waited until the rear steps of the rear car were about to pass.

"Good-by, Miss Gay!"

They shook hands firmly, and Pritchard swung himself onto the moving train. Gay, walking rapidly and presently breaking into a trot, accompanied him as far as the end of the platform. She wanted to say something that would please him very much without encouraging him too much.

"Looks as if I was after you!" she said.

Pritchard's whole soul was in his eyes. And there was a large lump in his throat. Suddenly Gay reached the end of the long platform and stopped running. The train was now going quite fast for an Adirondack train. The distance between them widened rapidly.

"Wish you weren't going," called Gay.

And she saw Pritchard reach suddenly upward and pull the rope by which trains are stopped in emergencies. While the train was stopping and the train hands were trying to find out who had stopped it and why, Pritchard calmly alighted, and returned to where Gay was standing.

"I just had to look at you once more--close," he said; "you never can tell what will happen in this world. I may never see you again, and the thought is killing me. Think of that once in a while, please."

He bent swiftly, caught her hand in his, kissed it, and was gone. Or, if not exactly gone, she saw him no more, because of suddenly blinding tears.

When she reached The Camp, Arthur was at the float to meet her.

"Phyllis and Herring haven't come back," he said. "Lee says they went fishing. Do you know where they went?"

"I don't. And they ought to have been back hours ago."

"Yes," said Arthur, "and we're all starting out to look for them. Care to come with me?"

"Yes," she said; "I've got to do _something_."

Something in her voice took his mind from the more imminent matter.

"What's wrong, Gay?"

She shook her head.

"Nothing. Let's start. If Phyl rowed, they must have gone to the nearest possible fishing grounds."

At this moment Sam Langham came puffing down from Cook House. He was dressed in white flannels and carried a revolver.

"It's to signal with," he explained. "I'm going to try Loon Brook, because it's the only brook I know when I see it."

"Bullard's gone to Loon Brook."

"Pshaw--can't I ever be of any use!"

"Good Lord," said Gay, "look!"

There came around the nearest bend a man rowing one guide boat and towing another, which was empty. Arthur called to him in a loud, hoarse voice:

"Where'd you find that boat?"

"Up Swamp Brook," came the answer.

Arthur and Gay went gray as ashes.

"Who's to tell Mary?" said Arthur presently.

Then Sam Langham spoke.

"If you don't mind," he said, "I think I will."

An hour later the entire male population of The Camp was dragging Swamp Brook for what they so dreaded to find.

XV

It wasn't all discouragement. For now and then it seemed as if the swamp was going to have a shore of dry land. At such times Herring would exclaim:

"There you see! It had never been done before, and now it's been done, and we've done it."

And then it would seem to Phyllis as if a great weight of fear and anxiety had been lifted from her.

But the shore of the swamp always turned out to be an illusion. Once Herring, firmly situated as he believed, went suddenly through a crust of sphagnum moss and was immersed to the arm-pits. For some moments he struggled grimly to extricate himself, and only sank the deeper. Then he turned to Phyllis a face whimsical in spite of its gravity and pallor, and said: "If you have never saved a man's life, now is your chance. I'm afraid I can't get out without help."

It was then that her phenomenally strong little hands and wrists stood them both in good stead. The arches of her feet against a submerged root of white cedar, she so pulled and tugged, and exhorted Herring to struggle free, that at last he came out of that pocket quagmire and lay exhausted in the ooze at her feet.

He was incased from neck to foot in a smooth coating of brown slime. Presently he rolled over on his back and looked up at her.

"There you see!" he said. "You'd never saved a man's life before, and now you've done it. Please accept my sincere expressions of envy and gratitude-- Why, you're crying!"

She was not only crying, but she was showing symptoms of incipient hysteria. "An old-fashioned girl," thought Herring, "like Great-grandmother Saltonstall." He raised himself to a sitting position just in time to slide an arm around her waist as, the hysteria now well under way, she sat down beside him and began to wave her hands up and down like a polite baby saying good-by to some one.

"One new thing under the sun after another," thought Herring. "Never had arm round hysterical girl's waist before. Got it there now. When you need _her_, she takes a good brace and pulls for all she's worth. When she needs _you_, she seats herself on six inches of water and yells. Just like Great-grandmother Saltonstall." Aloud he kept saying: "That's right! Greatest relief in the world! Go to it!" And his arm tightened about her with extraordinary tenderness.

Her hysterics ended as suddenly as they had begun. And then she wasted a valuable half-hour apologizing for having had them; Herring protesting all the while that he had enjoyed them just as much as she had, and that they had done him a world of good. And then they had to stop talking because their teeth began to chatter so hard that they simply couldn't keep on. Herring stuttered something about, "Exercise is what a body needs," and they rose to their feet and fought their way through a dense grove of arbor-vitæ.

"The stealthy Indian goes through such places without making a sound," said Herring.

"Or getting his moccasins wet," said Phyllis. "Oh!" And she sank to the waist.

"Never mind," said Herring, "it will be dark before long. And when we have no choice of where to step, maybe we'll have better luck."

"It will _have_ to be dark very soon," said Phyllis, "if we have any more of our clothes taken away from us by the brambles."

"That's a new idea!" exclaimed Herring. "Young couple starve to death in the woods because modesty forbids them to join their friends in the open. The head-line might be: 'Stripped by Brambles,' or 'The Two Bares.'"

He was so pleased with his joke that he had to lean against a tree. The laughing set him to coughing, and Phyllis beat him methodically between the shoulders.

Herring still refused to be serious. In helping Phyllis over the bad places, he performed prodigies of misapplied strength and made prodigious puns. And he said that never in his life had he been in such a delightful scrape.

Once, while they were resting, Phyllis said:

"All you seem to think of is the fun you're having. Most men would be thinking about the anxiety they were causing others and about the miseries of their companion."

"But," he protested, "you are enjoying yourself too. You don't think you are, but you are. It's your philosophy that is wrong. You like to live too much in the present. I like to lay by stores of delightful memories against rainy days. The worse you feel now, the more you'll enjoy remembering how you felt--some evening, soon--your back against soft cushions and the soles of your feet toward the fire."

"Ugh!" shuddered Phyllis. "Don't talk about fires. Oh, dear!"

"What's wrong _now_!"

"I'm so stiff I don't think I can take another step. We oughtn't to have rested so long."

But she did take another step, and would have fallen heavily if Herring had not caught her. A moment later she lost a shoe in the ooze, and wasted much precious daylight in vain efforts to locate and recover it.

"Sit down on that root," commanded Herring. And she obeyed. He knelt before her, lifted her wet, muddy little stockinged foot and set it on his knee.

"What size, please, miss?" he asked, giving an excellent imitation of a somewhat officious salesman.

"I don't know; I have them made," said Phyllis wearily, but trying her best to smile.

"Something in this style?" suggested Herring. He had secretly removed one of his own shoes, and handling it with a kind of comic reverence, as if the soggy, muddy thing was a precious work of art, he presented it to her attention.

And then Phyllis smiled without even trying and then laughed.

"I said a _shoe_," she said, "not a travelling bath-tub."

But he slipped that great shoe over her little foot, and so bound it to her ankle with his handkerchief and necktie that it promised to stay on.

"But you?" she said.

"Luck is with me to-day," said Herring. "Anybody can walk through an impassable swamp, but few are given the opportunity to hop. General Sherman should have thought of that. It would have showed the Confederates just what he thought of them if instead of marching through Georgia he had hopped."

And he pursued this new train of thought for some time. He improvised words to old tunes, and sang them at the top of his lungs: "As we were hopping through Georgia." And last and worst he sang: "There'll be a hop time in the old town to-night." And when he had occasion to address Phyllis directly, he no longer called her Miss Darling, but "Goody Two Shoes." He said that his own name was not Mr. Herring but Mr. Hopper, and that he was a famous cotillon leader.

But even he became a little quiet when the light began to fail, and a little serious.

"Whatever happens," he said, "it will be a great comfort to you to realize that it's entirely my fault. On the other hand, if we had gotten back into that boat, we might have been drowned long before this."

A little later Phyllis said: "I'm about all in. It's too dark to see. I----"

"Couldn't have chosen a better camping site myself," said Herring humbly. "First thing to think of is the water-supply--and fuel. Now, here the fuel grows right out of the water----"

"We haven't any matches."

"Yes, we have; but they are wet and won't light."

"We'll die of cold before morning," said Phyllis; "there's no use pretending we won't."

"On the contrary. Now is the time to pretend all sorts of things. Did you ever try to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together?"

"Never."