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“It’s too awful,–it’s just murder to let ’em go there!” said Mary Bell, heart-sick. For no dragon of old ever claimed his prey more regularly than did the terrible pools and quicksands of the great marsh.

Mrs. Bates was practical. Her old face blanched, but she began to plan instantly.

“Don’t cry, Mary Bell!” said she; “this thing is in God’s hands. He can save the poor little fellers jest as easy with a one-legged man as he could with a hundred hands. You drive over to the depot, Stumpy, and tell the operator to plug away at Barville until he gets some one to take a message to Pitcher’s barn. It’ll be a good three hours before they even git this far,” she continued doubtfully, as the old man eagerly rattled away, “and then they’ve got to get down to Henderson’s; but it may be an all-night search! Now, lemme see who else we can git. Deefy, over to the saloon, wouldn’t be no good. But there’s Adams’s Chinee boy, he’s a good strong feller; you stop for him, and git Gran’pa Barry, too; he’s home to-night!”

“Look here, Mrs. Bates,” said Mary Bell, “shall I go?”

The old woman speculatively measured the girl’s superb figure, her glowing strength, her eager, resolute face. Mary Bell was like a spirited horse, wild to be given her head.

“You’re worth three men,” said the storekeeper.

“Got light boots?”

“Yes,” said the girl, thrilled and quivering.

“You run git ’em!” said Mrs. Bates, “and git your good lantern. I’ll be gitting another lantern, and some whiskey. Poor little fellers! I hope to God they’re all sneakin’ home–afraid of a lickin’!–this very minute. And Mary Bell, you tell your mother I’ll close up, and come and sit with her!”

It was a sorry search-party, after all, that presently rattled out of town in the old wagon. On the back seat sat the impassive and good-natured Chinese boy, and a Swedish cook discovered at the last moment in the railroad camp and pressed into service. On the front seat Mary Bell was wedged in between the driver and Grandpa Barry, a thin, sinewy old man, stupid from sleep. Mary Bell never forgot the silent drive. The evening was turning chilly, low clouds scudded across the sky, little gusts of wind, heavy with rain, blew about them. The fall of the horse’s feet on the road and the rattle of harness and wheels were the only sounds to break the brooding stillness that preceded the storm. After a while the road ran level with the marshes, and they got the rank salt breeze full in their faces; and in the last light they could see the glitter of dark water creeping under the rushes. The first flying drops of rain fell.

“And right over the ridge,” said Mary Bell to herself, “they are dancing!”

A fire had been built at the edge of the marsh, and three figures ran out from it as they came up: two boys and a heavy middle-aged man. It was for Mary Bell to tell Henderson that it would be hours before he could look for other help than this oddly assorted wagonful. The man’s disappointment was pitiful.

“My God–my God!” he said heavily, as the situation dawned on him, “an’ I counted on fifty! Well, ’tain’t your fault, Mary Bell!”

They all climbed out, and faced the trackless darkening stretch of pools and hummocks, the treacherous, uncertain ground beneath a tangle of coarse grass. Even with fifty men it would have been an ugly search.

The marsh, like all the marshes thereabout, was intersected at irregular intervals by decrepit lines of fence-railing, running down from solid ground to the water’s edge, half a mile away. These divisions were necessary for various reasons. In duck season the hunters who came up from San Francisco used them both as guides and as property lines, each club shooting over only a given number of sections. Between seasons the farmers kept them in repair, as a control for the cattle that strayed into the marsh in dry weather. The distance between these shaky barriers was some two or three hundred feet. At their far extremity, the posts were submerged in the restless black water of the bay.