THE SHADES OF DEATH
"The Shades of Death" is a marsh on a mountain top, the great, wet, and soggy plain of the Pocono and Broad mountains.When the fugitives from Wyoming entered it, it was covered with a dense growth of pines, growing mostly out of dark, murky water, which in its turn was thick with a growth of moss and aquatic plants.
Snakes and all kinds of creeping things swarmed in the ooze.
Bear and panther were numerous.
Carpenter did not know any way around this terrible region, and they were compelled to enter it.Henry was again devoutly thankful that it was summer.In such a situation with winter on top of it only the hardiest of men could survive.
But they entered the swamp, Carpenter silent and dogged, still leading.Henry and his comrades kept close to the crowd.One could not scout in such a morass, and it proved to be worse than they bad feared.The day turned gray, and it was dark among the trees.The whole place was filled with gloomy shadows.It was often impossible to judge whether fairly solid soil or oozy murk lay before them.Often they went down to their waists.
Sometimes the children fell and were dragged up again by the stronger.Now and then rattle snakes coiled and hissed, and the women killed them with sticks.Other serpents slipped away in the slime.Everybody was plastered with mud, and they became mere images of human beings.
In the afternoon they reached a sort of oasis in the terrible swamp, and there they buried two more of their number who had perished from exhaustion.The rest, save a few, lay upon the ground as if dead.On all sides of them stretched the pines and the soft black earth.It looked to the fugitives like a region into which no human beings had ever come, or ever would come again, and, alas! to most of them like a region from which no human being would ever emerge.
Henry sat upon a piece of fallen brushwood near the edge of the morass, and looked at the fugitives, and his heart sank within him.They were hardly in the likeness of his own kind, and they seemed practically lifeless now.Everything was dull, heavy, and dead.The note of the wind among the leaves was somber.A long black snake slipped from the marshy grass near his feet and disappeared soundlessly in the water.He was sick, sick to death at the sight of so much suffering, and the desire for vengeance, slow, cold, and far more lasting than any hot outburst, grew within him.A slight noise, and Shif'less Sol stood beside him.
"Did you hear?" asked the shiftless one, in a significant tone.
"Hear what?" asked Henry, who had been deep in thought.
"The wolf howl, just a very little cry, very far away an' under the horizon, but thar all the same.Listen, thar she goes ag'in!"Henry bent his ear and distinctly heard the faint, whining note, and then it came a third time.
He looked tip at Shif'less Sol, and his face grew white -- but not for himself.
"Yes," said Shif'less Sol.He understood the look.We are pursued.Them wolves howlin' are the Iroquois.What do you reckon we're goin' to do, Henry?""Fight!" replied the youth, with fierce energy."Beat 'em off!""How?"
Henry circled the little oasis with the eye of a general, and his plan came.
"You'll stand here, where the earth gives a footing," he said, "you, Solomon Hyde, as brave a man as I ever saw, and with you will be Paul Cotter, Tom Ross, Jim Hart, and Henry Ware, old friends of yours.Carpenter will at once lead the women and children on ahead, and perhaps they will not hear the battle that is going to be fought here."A smile of approval, slow, but deep and comprehensive, stole over the face of Solomon Hyde, surnamed, wholly without fitness, the shiftless one."It seems to me," he said, "that I've heard o'
them four fellers you're talkin' about, an' ef I wuz to hunt all over this planet an' them other planets that Paul tells of, Icouldn't find four other fellers that I'd ez soon have with me.""We've got to stand here to the death," said Henry.
"You're shorely right," said Shif'less Sol.
The hands of the two comrades met in a grip of steel.
The other three were called and were told of the plan, which met with their full approval.Then the news was carried to Carpenter, who quickly agreed that their course was the wisest.
He urged all the fugitives to their feet, telling them that they must reach another dry place before night, but they were past asking questions now, and, heavy and apathetic, they passed on into the swamp.
Paul watched the last of them disappear among the black bushes and weeds, and turned back to his friends on the oasis.The five lay down behind a big fallen pine, and gave their weapons a last look.They had never been armed better.Their rifles were good, and the fine double-barreled pistols, formidable weapons, would be a great aid, especially at close quarters.
"I take it," said Tom Ross, "that the Iroquois can't get through at all unless they come along this way, an' it's the same ez ef we wuz settin' on solid earth, poppin' em over, while they come sloshin' up to us.""That's exactly it," said Henry."We've a natural defense which we can hold against much greater numbers, and the longer we hold 'em off, the nearer our people will be to Fort Penn.""I never felt more like fightin' in my life," said Tom Ross.
It was a grim utterance, true of them all, although not one among them was bloodthirsty.
