Weariness, lack of sleep, extraordinary exertion and the tremendous nervous strain under which he had been for the past forty-eight hours had been too much for Scott’s nerves. Now the realization that he was caught in one of those death traps of which he had read such horrible things and actually seen so little had broken him up completely. He lost all control of himself and struggled blindly. Left to himself he would undoubtedly have quickly exhausted his strength and have been slowly buried beneath those treacherous, quivering sands.

To Murphy it had appeared a very different proposition. He had seen many quicksands, and when once the first explosion of exasperation was over his downfall struck him as a good deal of a joke. He mistook Scott’s raving for a burst of anger and that made him laugh all the more. He had worked his way out of the quicksand and stepped back on to the solid ground before he realized what a condition Scott was really in.

Suddenly it came to him. With a single bound he was back beside the struggling man whose ineffective writhing had already worked his arms into the sand to the elbow. He grabbed Scott by the shoulders and lifted with all his might. He could feel his own feet sinking, but that did not worry him; he continued to pull. Slowly Scott’s arms were drawn from the grasping sands. As soon as the hands were free he shook his burden violently.

“Brace up, old man, and come out of it. You’re all right. Stop that struggling and we can walk right out of here. Stop it, I tell you.”

At first Scott did not seem to hear him. He continued to struggle and beat the air wildly even after his hands were clear, but gradually Murphy’s voice seemed to reach him as from a great distance and he looked at him in a dazed fashion like a man coming out of a nightmare.

“You are all right now,” Murphy reassured him. “We’ll be out of here in a minute. Pull up slowly on one foot while I steady you. It will come hard, but it will come all right if you keep at it. Don’t try to do it quick; you can’t do it that way. Just pull slowly and steadily. Feel it coming?”

Scott did not feel it coming at first, and for an instant he was on the verge of falling back into another fit of terror, but he managed to control himself and was rewarded by feeling his foot breaking slowly from the reluctantly yielding sand.

“That’s the stuff,” Murphy encouraged. “Now the other one. Comes hard, doesn’t it?”

It certainly did come hard and Scott felt as nearly utterly exhausted as he ever had in his life, but he had recovered his nerve and continued to pull doggedly. The perspiration stood in beads on his forehead and he could feel his strength oozing out of him. At last, after what seemed like a lifetime of desperate effort, the foot wa............