Slowly, cautiously, they made their way forward. Tod wondered if they were going round in a circle. The bog seemed endless. The drone of mosquitoes sounded in their ears as the insects were stirred from their hiding places. Neil stopped. Ahead, a wide pool shone dimly. "We've got to go round," he said.
He turned and vanished suddenly into the gloom. Tod heard the moist crunch of his footfalls in the ooze. Starting to follow, he felt the ground tremble beneath him. The earth gave way; mud and slime bubbled up about his knees. It sucked at his legs, dragged him down. He flung himself backward, but his feet did not yield. He lost his balance and went headlong into the slime. The dark warm slush closed over his head. He came up gasping, his eyes blinded. The stench in his nostrils almost overpowered him.
He seemed to have stumbled into the heart of corruption. He kicked and knew that he was swimming. Well, he'd make the other bank; it might be more solid there. He touched bottom. The mud rose about his ankles, lapped at his legs; long growing tendrils entwined themselves about his body, pulling him gently under. He kicked madly, threw himself at the earth. His hand touched coarse grass. He pulled, and it gave way. A mass of flying dirt filled his eyes. A thousand insects swarmed about his face, piercing his skin, droning like the faint hiss of escaping steam. The surface of the pool was alive with little scuttling spots. Bubbles, black and oily, floated up to the air.
"Neil!" he called. "Neil!"
The mist wavered about his head; it seemed to rise and let down the wan glow of the moon. In the light he saw small black heads with piercing eyes coming along the surface toward him. Water rats! Didn't they mean to wait even till he died before gnawing his bones? He splashed at them. They swung about and disappeared. He put out an arm to grasp the tussock near him, and instantly his hand was covered with a mass of stinging needles.
"Neil—Neil!"
A strange muffled sound to his right made him cast a quick look that way. He started. A few feet away a ghostly head was swaying in the water. It was so ghastly, so overladen with slime, he thought at first that he had come upon the body of a dead man whom the swamp had buried weeks before and was now disgorging. Then a pale hand rose wraithlike out of the slime, and in a tortured instant he knew that it was his brother.
Tod beat his way toward him. His tightened throat refused to yield word or cry.
"I'm all right," Neil quavered, spitting the ooze from his mouth. "I heard you fall—started after you and tumbled in. God! I thought I was never coming up. Here—get hold of this log."
Tod put up his hand and grasped a branch. It came away in his grip with a mass of scurrying beetles. He dropped it and dug his fingers this time into the rotten pulp of the trunk.
"I think I can get out, Neil," he said hoarsely. "Give me a lift—then I'll pull you out."
Resting his knee on his brother's shoulder, he gripped the log and flung himself upward. A second later he was prone on the grass. He filled his lungs with air. It was fetid; but he was out—out. Insects buzzed around him. He reached down and grasped his brother's hand, pulled, dug his feet into the mud, threw himself backward.
Neil crawled to the bank like a Mesozoic creature out of the slime. It was almost solid here. Their feet sank a few inches into the mud; but they could see. They jumped from tussock to tussock, balancing themselves dangerously near the pools. God! would they never get out of this quagmire? Jasper Swickard, Madame Therese and Jules seemed infinitely easier to cope with than this corruption.
To Tod, hours elapsed before they came to solid ground and saw in the moonlight the line of the roadway before them. Peace hung over the bog; not a sound came to their ears. Who could surmise that so near lay a pitiless death waiting to entrap its unwary victims?
Tod drew his hand across his face and looked at Neil. Heavens, what a sight! He himself must be a mess too. His cap was gone; his clothes hung wet and cold on his body; his toes curled in the slush of his shoes. He breathed deeply; they were free—free. Yet no sense of victory, of elation, came over him; rather did he feel weary, forlorn, depressed.
"Tod, do you think—they'll follow us?" The tone was listless, dead.
Tod turned. Neil was shivering, his teeth chattered loudly in the silence.
"We'd better run," Tod advised. "Maybe we'll warm up."
They started in a slow, loping trot up the roadway. Neil hung back, and Tod let his own pace slacken. They passed a farm on their left; villas took form and lined the road.
Neil drew to a stop. "Tod, I'm all in," he murmured. "I can't go on."
It was the Neil of the Villa Paradis who spoke, the Neil whose body and brain had been beguiled by sootheing drugs. Tod, putting his hand on the other's shoulder, felt the spasm of pain that shot through the tall form.
"Neil, you mean," he stammered, "that after all this time you can't do without it? Perhaps—if we could get some—"
Neil jerked away. "No! . . . I'm through with it—through for good."
Tod saw him tremble, saw him drop to his knees and sway with his fingers writhing at his lips. "I won't—I won't!"
That aching need, his brother knew, was torturing him now; it was crushing him down again, striking him to the ground.
"He needs a bed," Tod thought, "and sleep. We're broke—dead broke. And Marseilles is a hundred miles away."
CHAPTER VI
THE STORY OF THE ANNIE JAMISON
THE hours that followed were like a horrible dream to Tod, a terrible vision of the night which he could not shake off.
He led his brother down to the shore. They stumbled upon a fishing smack turned keel up on the sand; and here the boy took the dripping clothes off his brother and wrapped him as best he could in an old tarpaulin that he found near by. Neil dropped into an uneasy sleep. When the sky lightened at the false dawn, Tod waded into the surf and scrubbed their clothes, hung them out to dry when the sun should rise, and crawled, shivering, beneath the boat with a spidery net drawn about him in misty folds.
When he awoke, the sun was beating in on them. Neil, yawning, flung him a weary smile. "I feel better," he observed. "Only hungry—and tired."
"How are we going to get to Marseilles?" Tod asked, as he brought their clothes and they dressed. "We haven't a penny."
"I'll get some grub. You wait." Neil turned toward a fisherman's hut that rose from the shore toward Nice.
Tod sat with his arms about his knees, thinking. Neil was willing to beg in his hunger, beg like the outcasts he had seen in Panama, like the riff-raff along the Marseilles water front. They had come to that, then ·—they were beggars.
Neil returned with an immense hunk of peasant's bread and a slice of home-made cheese. "Eat it, Tod," he said. "I paid for it—with your watch." He laughed shortly. "You dropped the thing on the ground, so I picked it up. I got two francs extra— enough to take us to the American Consul at Nice."
"Well, my Ingersoll wasn't worth much more," the boy admitted. "By golly, this bread tastes good."
With the food warming them and the walk toward the tramway loosening their chilled muscles, they waxed almost gay. Spring had caught them on the Azure Coast and their hearts refused to be sad, refused even though Neil lacked cap and coat and their clothes had a scarecrow appearance.
"So you've been helping the cook on a freighter," Neil pursued, as they sat on the forward end of the Cagnes trolley bound for Nice.
"Yes, the Araby of the European-Pacific Steamship Company."
"Good heavens, Tod, that's Swickard's outfit."
"I know it. Sheila Murray got me the job."