Chapter IV: Varney's Paintpot

"I'm 'plunk' into it! I'm sinking in the swamp mud! I can't--can't get out! Oh--h-help--help!"

Colin's wild cries as he found himself sinking in the oozing, olive-green mud of the vast alder-swamp, struck his comrades with a momentary blind horror.

The half-immersed boy was indeed "plunk" into it; he was submerged to his waist and slowly sinking inch by inch farther, now fairly gibbering in his frantic terror of being swallowed bodily by one of the many sucking throats of Big Swamp.

He writhed and struggled madly, snatching at the rank grass whose slimy roots came away in his hand--at the bushes--even at the brilliant poison sumac, already ruddy as a swamp lamp--with the clutch of a drowning man; Leon's remembered words stinging his ears like noisome insects: "There are _live_ spots in that swamp where one might go out of sight--_quick_!"

The hideous slimy life of the spongy bog, half water, half mud!

Leon's sharp-featured face at that moment seemed to be carved out of pale wood as his snapping eyes took in the swamp, with its groves of whispering alders, its margin of scattered birch-trees and swamp cedars, the lamplike sumac burning maliciously--the sinking boyish figure amid the moist green dreariness!

Now, Starrie Chase was by Nature's gift more quick-witted than his companions, even than the trained boy scout.

"If we try to wade in toward him, we'll sink ourselves!" he cried. "I'll try to haul him out with that birch-tree."

A leaping, plunging run, sinking to his ankles, and with the long bound of a gray squirrel he alighted upon the supple trunk of a tall white-birch sapling that grew within the borders of the swamp!

No squirrel ever climbed more rapidly than did he to its middle branches.

And the yellow flame in his eyes, now, was not a spark from persecution's fire.

"Hold on, Col! Keep up! The tree'll pull you out. I'll bend it down to you. When it comes within reach of your arms catch hold of the trunk! Hang on for your life! I'll shin down, and 'twill hoist you up--you're lighter than I am!"

He was bending the tall, supple trunk, with its leafy crown, down--down--as he spoke. It creaked beneath his fifteen-year-old weight. The strained roots groaned in the swampy soil.

"Gee! if the roots should give way _I'll_ land in the soup too," was his piercing thought; and a shudder ran down his spine as he saw the pools of olive-green bog-soup beneath him--bottomless pools--in which floated slimy, stagnant things, leaves and dead insects.

Pools more horrible even than the patch of liquidescent mud in which Colin was sinking!

But Starrie Chase would never have attained to the leadership that was his among the boys of Exmouth if there had been nothing in him but the savage--the petty, not the primitive savage--that persecuted chipmunks and old women. Now the hero who slept in the shadow of the savage was aroused and there was "something doing"!

Lying flat upon the pliant sapling he forced it down with his heaving chest, with every ounce of will and weight in his strong body.

The silvery trunk bent to the sinking boy like a white angel.

With a cry he flung his arms upward and grasped it. At the same moment Leon slid down and jumped to a comparatively firm spot of the quagmire.

The flexible young tree rebounded slowly with the weight lighter than his pendant from it--like a stone attached to the boom of a derrick.

In a few seconds it was almost upright, with Colin Estey, mud-plastered to his arm-pits, hanging on like an olive-green bough, his dilated eyes starting from his head, his face blanched to the gray-white of the friendly trunk.

"Slide down now, Col, an' jump--I'll stand by to give you a hand!" cried Leon, the daring rescuer.

And in another minute the victim was safe on _terra firma_--out of the slimy throat of Big Swamp.

"Oh! I thought I was going--to sink down--out of sight!" he gasped between lips that did not seem to move, so tightly was the skin of his face stretched by terror. "That I'd be swallowed by the mud! I would have been--but for Leon!"

"You surely were quick! Quick as a flash!" The two boys who had been spectators gazed open-mouthed at Starrie Chase as if they saw the hero who for three brief minutes had flashed out into the open.

"Whew! I got such a fright that I'll never forget it; I declare I feel weak still," mumbled Coombsie.

"Pooh! your fright--was nothing to mine," Colin's stiff lips began to tremble now with recovering life. "And I'm plastered with mud to my shoulder-blades--wet too! But I don't care, as I'm out of it!" He glanced nervously toward Big Swamp, and at the clump of restless alders which probably still sheltered Raccoon Junior.

"The sun is quite hot here; let's move back up the hill and sit down!" Nixon pointed to the grassy slope behind them where the crows still flapped their wings around the chestnut-tree with an occasional relieved "Caw!" "We'll roll you over there, Col, and hang you out to dry!"

"Well! suppose we eat our lunch during the process, eh?" suggested Marcoo. "Goodness! wouldn't it be 'one on us' if a fox had sneaked out of the woods and run off with the lunch-basket? We left it under the chestnut-tree."

They made their way back to that nut-tree, whose hoary trunk was still swathed with Leon's coat and the scout's Norfolk jacket, knotted round it to prevent the young coon which had signally outwitted them from "lighting down."

"Whew! I feel as if 'twas low tide inside me. A scare always makes me hungry," remarked Leon, not at all like a hero, but a very prosaic boy. "I think eating in the woods is the best part of the business!"

"I say! You'd make a jolly good scout; do you know it?" put forth Nixon.

But the other only hunched his shoulders with the grin of a contortionist as he bit into a ham sandwich, richly flavored with peanut butter and quince jelly from the shaking which the basket had undergone on its passage through the woods.

The troop of hungry crows which had pecked unavailingly at the wicker cover, had retired to some distance and watched the picnic in croaking envy.

Colin lay out in the sun, being rolled over at intervals by the scout, to dislodge the caking mud from his clothes, and to knead up his "soggy" spirits.

"Well! if we had carried out our first intention this morning, Nix, if we had gone down the river to the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes near its mouth, we might _all_ have stuck high and dry, in the river mud, if the tide forsook us," said Coombsie by and by, as he dispensed a limited amount of cold coffee from a pint bottle. "That's a pleasure in store, whenever we can get Captain Andy to take us in his motor-boat. Say! he's great; he was skipper of a Gloucester fishing schooner until a year ago, when he lost his vessel in a fog; the main-boom fell on him and broke his leg; he's lame still. He stays in Exmouth with his daughter most o' the time now. He was one o' the Gloucester crackerjacks: he saved so many lives at sea that he used to be called the Ocean Patrol!"

"Why, he must be a regular sea-scout," Nixon's eye watered; he had the bump of hero-worship strongly developed.

"Captain Andy's laying for you, Leon," remarked Coombsie, passing round some jelly-roll.

"Oh, I guess I know why!" came the nonchalant answer. "It's for tying a wooden shingle to a long branch of the apple-tree near old Ma'am Baldwin's house, so that it would keep tapping on her door through the night. If the wind is in the right direction it works finely--keeps her guessing all the time! I've lain low among the marsh-grass and seen her come to the door, in the dark, a dozen times, gruntin' like a grizzly! I hate solitary cranks!"

"Captain Andy says that she was never peculiar as she is now, until her youngest son ran wild and was sent to a reformatory," suggested Marcoo gravely.

"I'd cut out that trick, if I were you!" growled the scout.

"Oh! I don't know; there are times when a fellow must paint the town red--or something--or 'he'd bust'! That reminds me, we were going to daub ourselves with red from Varney's Paintpot. If we're to find it to-day, we'd better be moving on pretty soon. It must be after two o'clock now."

"I haven't got my watch on, but it's quite that, or later," the scout glanced upward at the brilliant afternoon sun.

"Hadn't we better give up all idea of visiting the Paintpot or the Bear's Den," Marcoo suggested rather nervously, "and begin tramping homeward--if we can discover in which direction home lies? I think we ought to try and find some outlet from the woods."

"So do I. Col will have a peck of swamp mud to carry round with him. His clothes are heavy and damp. If I only had my compass we could steer a fairly straight course, for these woods lie to the southeast of the town; don't they? Anybody got a watch on? I left mine at home." Nixon looked eagerly at his companions.

"Our boy-scout handbook tells us how to use the watch as a compass by pointing the hour-hand to the sun and reckoning back halfway to noon, at which point the south would be."

"My 'timer' is out of commission," regretted Marcoo.

Neither of the other two boys possessed a watch.

"In that case we might trust to the dog to lead us out of the woods. We'd better just tell Blink to go home, and follow him; he'll find his way out some time; won't you, pup?" Nix stooped to fondle the tan ears of the terrier which had taken to him from the first, having never harbored the ghost of a suspicion of his being a "flowerpot fellow."

The little dog stretched his jaws in a tired yawn. The pink pads of his paws were sore from much running, following up rabbit trails, and the rest. But the purple lights in his faithful brown eyes said plainly: "Leave it to me, fellows! Instinct can put it all over reason, just now!"

But Blink's master started an opposition movement. He had been invited to guide the expedition; he was averse to resigning such leadership to his terrier; in that case his supposed knowledge of the woods, of which he had boasted aforetime to the Exmouth boys, would henceforth be regarded as a "windy joke."

"Follow Blink!" Thus he flouted the idea. "If we do, we won't get out of these woods before midnight! He'll dodge round after every live thing he sees, from a weasel to a grasshopper--like a regular will-o'-the-wisp. The sensible thing to do is to search for a logging-road--we're sure to come to one in time--and follow that on. Or a stream--a stream would lead out on to the salt-marshes, to join the river."

"There don't appear to be any streams in these woods; they seem as dry as an attic!" Nixon, the scout, knew that the proposal now adopted by the majority was all wrong, contrary to the advice derived through his book from the great Chief Scout, Grand Master of Woodlore, but he hated to raise another fuss or make a split in the camp.

So the quartette of boys filed slowly up the slope and back into the woods, Coombsie carrying the almost empty basket, containing sparse remnants of the feast: "We may be hungry before we arrive home!" he remarked, with involuntary foreboding in his tone.

That foreboding increased as they pressed on. Each one now became depressingly sure that he was wandering in the woods "lak wit' eye shut"; without any knowledge of his bearings, or of how to retrace his steps to the log shanty flanked by the mountain of sawdust, whence he might be able to find his way back to the farm-clearing where he had encountered the musical woodchopper, frightened boy and dead raccoon.

The boy scout was silently reproaching himself for having fallen short of the prudent standard inculcated by his scout training. Carried away by the novelty of these strange woods and his equally strange companions, he had lowered the foresail of prudence--just tramped along blindly with the others--taking no note of landmarks, nor leaving any trace behind him that would serve to guide him back along the course by which he had come.

But, then, he had trusted to Leon's leadership; and the latter's boasted knowledge of the woods proved, as Coombsie had suspected, to consist of bluff as a chief ingredient!

"I wish I had kept my eyes open and noticed things as I came along, or that I had thought of notching the trees at intervals with my penknife--blazing a trail--which we could have followed back," lamented the scout. "I guess we're only wandering round in a circle now; we're not hitting a logging-road or trail of any kind. Tck! puppie,"--emitting an inarticulate summons between his tongue and palate,--"let's see what's the matter with those forepaws of yours! Blood, is it? Have you scratched them?"

He stooped to examine Blink's slim white forelegs.

"_Gee whiz!_ it isn't blood--it's clay--red clay: we must be on the trail of Varney's Paintpot, fellows!"

So they were! They presently found it, that red-ochre bed, lying in obscurity among the bushes, scrub oak, dwarf pine and cedar, together with tall ferns, that stood guard over it jealously, in a particularly dense portion of the woods.

Once the clay had been vivid and valuable, with wonderful painting properties. Many an Indian had stained his arrow blood-red with it. Many a white man, an early settler, had painted the rude furniture of his home from that forest paintpot--then a moist tank of Nature's pigment.

Later on it had been used too, as civilization progressed, and was claimed by the man whose name it bore.

Now, it was for the most part caked and dried up, its coloring power weakened; yet there were still moist and vivid spots such as that in which Blink, with the dog's unerring instinct for scenting out the unusual, had smeared himself.

And those spots the boys promptly turned into a rouge-pot. They painted their own faces and each other's, until more savage-looking red men these woods had never seen.

They forbore from delaying to smear their bodies, as Nixon had suggested, for one word was now booming in each tired brain like a foghorn through a mist: "Lost! Lost! _Lost!_" And they could not quite escape from it in this new diversion.

Still they tried to dye hope a fresh rose-color at this forest paintpot too: to silence with whooping yells and fantastic capers, and in flitting war-dances in and out among the trees, the grim raving of that word in their ears.

They painted Blink likewise in zebra-like stripes across his back, whereupon he promptly rolled on the ground, blurring his markings, until he was a mottled and grotesque red-and-white object.

"He looks like a clown's dog," said Coombsie. "If any one should meet us in the woods, they'd think we were a troop of painted guys escaped from a circus! We'll create a sensation in the town when we get home--if we ever do?" _sotto voce_. "Hadn't we better stop 'training on' now, and try to get somewhere?"

So, controlling the training-on, capering savage now rampant in each one corresponding to his painted face, they toiled on again, while the afternoon shadows lengthened in the woods--until they stood transfixed, their war-whoops silenced, before another surprise of the woods on which they had tumbled, unprepared.

It was a lengthy gray cairn of stones with a rude wooden marker at the top bearing the date 1790, and at the foot a modern granite slab inscribed with the words: "Bishop's Grave," and the date of the stone's erection.

"_Bishop's Grave!_" Coombsie ejaculated, while the empty basket drooped heavily from his hand as if "the grasshopper had suddenly become a burden." "I've heard of the grave, but I've never seen it before. Bishop was lost in these woods about a hundred and twenty-one years ago; he couldn't find his way out and wandered round till he died. His body was discovered months afterwards and they buried it here."

Awe fell upon the four boys. Their faces were drawn under the smearing of paint. Their eyes gleamed strangely, like sunken islands, from out their ruddy setting. The mottled terrier, with that sympathetic perception which dogs have of their masters' moods, pointed one ear sharply and drooped the other, like a flag at half-mast, while he stared at the rude cairn.

The scout impulsively lifted his broad-brimmed hat as he was in the habit of doing if, when marching with his troop, he encountered a funeral.

In the mind of each lad tolled like a slow bell the menacing echo of Toiney's words: "You walkee--walkee--en you haf so tire' en so lonesam you _go deaded_!"