Overhead, thorn-armed vines and the drooping branches of the dreadful prickly ash hang down to retard man’s progress and augument his anguish.
In every damp spot the deadly moccasin lurks; by every decayed stump and root the venomous cottonmouth guards its den; insects thrashed up by the agitation of the grass and weeds rise like an Egyptian plague and blind the eyes and fill the nostrils and choke the throat.
And through it all, mud which bogs the runner to his knees; at every twenty steps a pool of water and mire, which may be shallow enough for a sparrow to wade without wetting his feathers, or as deep as a well; and poison ivy, growing waist high, saturating man’s garments with its vitriol juices, and burning the flesh as if the runner were wading in a caldron of boiling oil!
But the pursuing dog slips unhindered through the jungle, runs unmired through the mud, swims the pools of water, and stands howling underneath the tree where the fugitive has climbed to escape the canine’s tearing teeth.
In half an hour the negroes, scratched, torn, snagged, wounded, bleeding, mud-covered, half-naked, looking more like wild beasts than men, stood on the banks of the Massacre Bayou. Forty yards behind them a pack of ravening dogs bayed a red-hot trail.
“Swim it!” Mobile panted. “Git across dis creek, fer Gawd’s sake!”
They leaped into the stream and dragged their exhausted bodies up the opposite bank just as the raging dogs stopped at the water’s edge on the bank they had just left.
Mobile ran to a hickory sapling as large around as his arm.
“He’p me break dis off, men,” he screamed. “We got to fight ’em!”
With the strength of desperation, the three men wrenched at the sapling, snapped it off at the roots, broke it in a proper length for a club, and as quickly as possible selected and prepared two others like it.
“Look out, niggers!” Mobile howled. “Dey’s gittin’ ready to swim across! Kill eve’y dog as quick as his front feet touches the land on dis side. Whatever happens, git dem big, black, long-eared debbils fust!”
While he was speaking two of the bloodhounds leaped from the bank and came toward them, swerving not an inch before the threatening clubs.
Mobile stepped to the edge of the water and stood poised to strike, his crazed eyes glaring at one of the swimming dogs, the features of his face quivering with spasms of pain and exhaustion. Then the hickory descended, and the immense dog sank under the water with a startled grunt.