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."

"Well, try it. It will make you warmer than the fire would. Afterward we

will play 'Paddy cake, Paddy cake,' and 'Bean Porridge hot.'"

"Do men in danger always carry on the way you do?" asked Phyllis.

"Always," he answered.

"I can understand trying to be funny during a cavalry charge, or while

falling off a cliff," said Phyllis, "but not while slowly and miserably

congealing."

"You are not a Bostonian," said Herring. "Half the inhabitants of that

municipality freeze to death and the others burn."

"I've stayed in Boston," said Phyllis, "and the only difference that I

could see between it and other places was that the people were more

agreeable and things were done in better taste. And what gardens!"

"Ever seen the Arboretum?"

"Have I?"

"In lilac time?"

"Mm!"

She was on her favorite topic. She forgot that she was cold, wet,

miserable, and a frightful anxiety to her family.

"But why be an innkeeper?" asked Herring. "Why not set up as a

landscape-gardener?"

"I don't know enough. But I've often thought----"

"I've got five hundred acres outside of Boston that I'd like to turn you

loose on."

"You speak as if I were a goat."

"The first thing to do is to drain the swamps. Now, I'll make you a

proposition. I can't put it in writing, because it's too dark to see and

I have no writing materials, but there is nothing fishy about us

Herrings. You to landscape my place for me, cause a suitable house to

be built, and so forth; I to pay you a thousand dollars a month, and a

five per cent commission on the total expenditure."

"And what might _that_ amount to?"

"What you please," said Herring politely.

"Who says Bostonians are cold?" exclaimed Phyllis. And there began to

float through her head lovely visions of landscapes of her own making.

"You're still joking, aren't you?" she said after a while.

"I don't know landscapes well enough to joke about them," he said.

"But I can't design a house!"

"Oh, you will have architects to do that part. You just pick the general

type."

"What kind of a house do you want?"

"It depends on what kind of a house _you_ want."

"Oh, dear," she exclaimed, "what fun it would be!"

"Will you do it?"

She was tempted beyond her strength.

"Yes," she said, and began to talk with irresponsible delight and

enthusiasm.

"Ah," thought Herring to himself, "find out what really interests a girl

and she'll forget all her troubles."

It began suddenly to grow light.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Phyllis. "The woods must be on fire! Oh, the

poor trees!"

"It isn't fire," said Herring, "it's the moon--'Queen and huntress,

chaste and fair--goddess excellently bright'--was ever such luck! I

hoped we were going to stand here cosily all night talking about

marigolds and cowslips and wallpapers, and now it's our duty to move on.

Come, Goody Two Shoes, Policeman Moon has told us to move on. I shall

never forget this spot. And I shan't ever be able to find it again."

They toiled forward a little way, and lo! upon a sudden, they came to

firm and rocky land that sloped abruptly upward from the swamp. They

climbed for several hundred feet and came out upon a bare hilltop, from

which could be seen billows of forest and one great horn of Half Moon

Lake, silver in the moonlight.

"Why, it isn't a mile to camp," said Phyllis. She swayed a little,

tottered, rocked backward and then forward, and fell against Herring's

breast in a dead faint.

In a few moments she came to and found that she was being carried in

strong arms. It was a novel, delicious, and restful sensation--one which

it seemed immensely sensible to prolong. She did not, then, immediately

open her eyes.

She heard a voice cheerful, but very much out of breath, murmuring over

her:

"New experience. Never carried girl before. Experience worth repeating.

Like 'em old-fashioned--like Great-grandmother Saltonstall. Like 'em to

faint."

A few minutes later, "Where am I?" said Phyllis.

"In my arms," said Herring phlegmatically, as if that was one of her

habitual residing places.

"Put me down, please."

"I hear," said he, "and I obey with extreme reluctance. I made a bet

with myself that I could carry you all the way. And now I shall never

know. Feel better?"

"Mm," she said, and "What a nuisance I've been all through! But it was

pretty bad, some of it, wasn't it?"

"Already you are beginning to take pleasure in remembering. What did I

tell you? Don't be frightened. I am going to shout."

He shouted in a voice of thunder, and before the echo came back to them

another voice, loud and excited, rose in the forest. And they heard

smashings and crashings, as a wild bull tearing through brittle bushes.

And presently Sam Langham burst out of the thicket with a shower of

twigs and pine-needles.

His delight was not to be measured in words. He apostrophized himself.

"Good old Sam!" he said. "He knew you weren't drowned in the brook. He

knew it would be just like Herring to want to cross that swamp. As soon

as I heard somebody say that it was impassable, I said: 'Where is the

other side? That's the place to look for them.' But why didn't you make

more noise?"

"Oh," said Herring, "we were so busy talking and exploring and doing

things that had never been done before that it never occurred to us to

shout."

"Herring," said Langham sternly, "you have the makings of a hero, but

not, I am afraid, of a woodsman."

"Well, we're safe enough now," said Herring. "Excuse me a moment----"

"Excuse you! What?"

"It's very silly--been sick you know--over-exertion--think better faint

and get it over with."

Langham knelt and lifted Herring's head.

"You lift his feet," he said to Phyllis, "send the blood to his heart;

bring him to."

Herring began to come out of his faint.

"This young man," said Langham, "may be something of an ass, but he's

got sand."

"He carried me a long way," said Phyllis, the tears racing down her

cheeks; "and he's only just over typhoid, and he never stopped being

cheerful and gallant, and he _isn't_ an ass!"

Herring came to, but was not able to stand. He had kept up as long as he

had to, and now there was no more strength in him.

Phyllis accepted the loan of Langham's coat.

"I'll stay with him," she said, "while you go for help."

The moment Langham's back was turned she spread the coat over Herring.

"_Please--don't!_" he said.

"You be quiet," said she sharply. "How do you feel?"

"Pretty well used up, thank you. Hope you'll 'scuse me for this

collapse. Shan't happen again. Lucky thing you and I don't both collapse

same moment."

A faint moan was wrung from him. She touched his cheek with her hand. It

was hot as fire. She was an old-fashioned girl, and the instinct of

nursing was strong in her.

She was an old-fashioned girl. There had almost always been a young man

in her life about whom, for a while, she wove more or less intensely

romantic fancies. They came; they went. But almost always there was one.

She raised her lovely face and looked at the moon, and made an unspoken

confession. There had always been one. Well, now there was another!