Page:Mistress Madcap (1937).pdf/136

 had spent one of the most trying nights of her youthful life, she followed her guide out through the door.

Free! That is what every blade of dried, brown grass said to her, what every rattling leaf on well-nigh barren tree limbs proclaimed. Free! Her own eager footsteps, treading almost on the Indian's moccasined heels in her joy of escape, shouted the tidings to the silent swamp world.

The Indian did not choose a northerly path through the swamp, though Mehitable was almost sure that had been the direction whence she had been led by Hawtree and Squire Briggs and that toward the north lay the only real way out. Instead, however, her guide, this time skirting the more obvious bogs and great standing pools of skim ice, and seeming to exhibit an almost miraculous sense of direction and judgment in choosing the harder ground, led her toward the west straight through the swamp.

Once or twice a rabbit scuttled across before them, and once the girl saw the flash of some silvery-gray animal—probably a fox—as it disappeared into the grass. But no human offered resistance to their advance, and another hour saw Mehitable scrambling up the bank from the swamp into the serene safety of the Second Road.

There the Indian paused. Mehitable, above him on the road, turned in time to see his brown hand gesture a brief farewell to her before he vanished back into the gloom of the marsh. And with his vanishing, the swamp became once more as remote, as inaccessible, as dreamlike as ever. And she began to run toward home.