The girls listened, clinging together, scarcely daring to breathe, and the cry was repeated, fainter and coming abruptly to an end.

“Darry! Darry!” cried Amy, in a sudden, terrible fear. “That was his voice, Jessie! He is in trouble! He may be hurt, dying——”

As though driven to recklessness by the thought, Amy turned and dashed blindly ahead, sinking suddenly almost to her knees in mud and water.

Jessie and Nell dragged her out, only quick action saving them all from being sucked down into the merciless black slime.

“Oh, I am sorry, Jess—Nell!” said Amy, sobbing in her fright and remorse. “I might have killed you both! I won’t do it again. But, girls, we must find Darry!”

“The ground is harder over here,” cried Jessie, her words coming quick and staccato through chattering teeth. “Come this way.”

She dashed madly through the underbrush and entangling vines, catching her clothes on bushes and tearing them recklessly. Nell and Amy followed her blindly, the echo of that haunting cry for help flogging them onward.

Their hands and faces were scratched and bleeding, their clothes torn in a hundred places, and still they went on. Once Amy became so helplessly entangled in the rank undergrowth that Nell and Jessie were forced to stop and spend precious minutes in the effort to tear her loose.

Again, Jessie, setting the pace, missed her footing on the solid ground and sank into the yielding mud. Luckily, Amy and Nell were close behind her, and with a strength born of desperation pulled her back to a safe footing.

At times they stopped and listened again for Darry’s voice. But no repetition of that cry came to guide them, and they could only struggle on blindly, pantingly, trusting that another hundred yards would bring them to him.

Still no sign of him, and they paused exhausted, to gather strength for a further search. They looked at each other for the first time and wanted to cry at the pitiful picture they made.

Covered with mud, clothes torn, hair hanging stringy and wild from contact with twigs and bushes, faces scratched and bleeding, they themselves might easily have been mistaken for the ones in need of rescue.

But after that one startled look they returned frantically to Darry’s need of help.

“We seem so utterly helpless,” Amy cried despairingly. “We might wander around forever like this and never find him. We have nothing to guide us—nothing!”

“Come on,” urged Jessie. “I am sure the cry came from this direction. If we go on, we have a chance of finding him. If we stand still we have none.”

So on again, discouragement and despair growing as they pushed farther and farther into the tangled vegetation of the swamp.

At last, when even Jessie had begun to acknowledge they had failed, they heard voices. They stopped short, fearful lest the owners of them might be some of the men and women from the hut in the swamp.

The voices were masculine and carefully guarded. Creeping closer, Amy suddenly gave a cry of delight and flung herself forward. When Jessie and Nell followed they found her in the act of embracing the astonished Burd, while Fol stood by looking on incredulously.

There were many questions to be asked and answered on both sides, but they hurried the explanations, goaded on by the thought of Darry and his need of them.

The two boys, it seemed, had been hunting ceaselessly for their missing chum since the morning of the first day they had spent in the swamp, when Darry had become separated from them and disappeared as completely as though he had been spirited away by gnomes.

At first they had not been alarmed, thinking that they must soon come upon him, but as the hours passed and still no sign of him, they had become greatly worried. That, said Burd, was where the real search began.

“But we just heard him now!” cried Amy. “He was calling for help, and it sounded as if he were a long distance off.”

Burd nodded and rubbed the stubbly beard which had begun to put in an appearance, the result of two days of neglect.

“That was Darry, all right,” he said. “If he had only kept on shouting we might have had some chance of finding him.”

“Sounded to us as if that last cry was choked off,” said Nell gravely.

“Probably Darry tried to yell again but they wouldn’t let him,” put in Fol.

“Who do you mean by ‘they?’” asked J............